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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we are discussing Plato's Phaedo, or in ancient times that had the subtitle of on the Soul. It tells of the death of Socrates and his various arguments for the immortality of the soul. The phaedo is or phaedo is a complicated dialogue. It's a long dialogue, but it's very beautiful and very much worth the effort. So it merits a slow, attentive and subtle read. And to help us with this type of read, we are joined by Dr. Christopher Frey and fantastic thinker, who really is going to hold our hand and walk us through these various arguments of the immortality of the soul. We're going to discuss the first part this week and the second part next week. So is it beautiful? Yes. Is it difficult also? Yes. But it's very much worth your time. So join us today for an excellent conversation on Plato's Phaeto with Dr. Christopher Frey. Foreign welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father, and serve as chancellor and general counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. So far we have read Homer, Hesiod and many of the Greek poets. And on Plato, we have read first Alcibiades, the Euthyphro, the Apology and the Crito. Check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and thegreatbookspodcast.com where we actually have a lot of guides that can guide you or your small group through the great texts. Today we are discussing the Phaedo or On the Soul, which tells the story of the death of Socrates. To help guide us through the phaedo, we have as our guest Dr. Christopher Frey, who is currently the McFarlane professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. Before coming to Tulsa, he was a professor at the University of South Carolina and at the University of Chicago. Dr. Frey works primarily on the history of Ancient Greek philosophy with an emphasis on Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics. In addition to this, his main areas of research, he has secondary projects and occasionally publishes in the philosophy of perception and mind, metaphysics and the philosophy of action. Dr. Frey, welcome.
- [02:30]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this for some time.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, very good. So just tell us a little bit about, you know, your scholarship and your work at tu.
- [02:39]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, well, as you mentioned my primary research area is ancient Greek philosophy, and though I read widely across that area and teach quite a bit of it, the main focus of my research and publication is Aristotle, Aristotle's metaphysics, and I guess what we'd now call science or his natural philosophy. And in particular, I've worked quite a bit on Aristotle's conception of the soul. So I'm just finishing up a long book project called the Principle of Life, in which I discuss what Aristotle thinks life is, what the soul's role is. You know, the border between the animate and the inanimate. And so, you know, our topic today, Plato, on the soul, is relevant to this. They have different conceptions of what a soul is, but it is a topic I'm quite interested in. But here I teach in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. About half my teaching is philosophy classes. And so far I've been here about this is. I'm in the middle of my second academic year. I'm mostly teaching history of ancient philosophy and a little bit of medieval philosophy as well. I also teach quite a bit in the university's new honors college, and that allows me to teach a wide variety of great texts, including some philosophical classics, but, you know, great literature and poetry and much else besides.
- [04:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. So you're mainly an Aristotelian scholar. Do you have a particular love, though, for Plato or. Why should we be reading Plato and not just read Aristotle?
- [04:21]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I think Plato is absolutely fantastic, and a lot of my favorite aspects of Aristotle are, you know, deeply Platonic commitments that he has. But one nice thing about Plato in particular that I'm sure you've already recognized, having already done a few podcasts on it, is how kind of vibrant just the dialogue format is. There's. There's a way in which, properly done philosophy should be a communal enterprise. Not just someone holed away in a room by themselves, but something done in conversation with others. And that's, you know, it's nice. It's amazing works of literature in addition to the philosophical arguments and positions being put forward. I think reading Plato is as good a place to start doing philosophy as there can be, you know.
- [05:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Very good. Yeah, we've really kind of been talking about how we come to appreciate Plato, particularly in how we read him.
- [05:25]
Dr. Christopher Frey
There are many different ways to do so.
- [05:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, so let me. Let me kind of throw out, like, what we've been tracking, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, because, you know, in a lot of ways, what we've been trying to push is really the drama is part of the pedagogy. Right. So like, for instance, like in the phaedo. Right. There's a certain way to read it. You just skip straight to the arguments. Right. So he gives like four arguments for the immortality of soul. Do we believe these? Yes. No. Maybe. Move on. We've now digested the totality of the phaedo.
- [05:49]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. You could try and write out valid arguments, number the premises, see where he messes up. There is value in this. Like, I mean, he does provide arguments. But you were suggesting that. That there's more to it than just. Than just arguments or philosophical claims being made. I think that. I think that's right.
- [06:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I think that, you know, just when you just parse out the arguments, you know, maybe that is good in part, but that doesn't seem to be the whole. And I think you can maybe miss some of what Plato the teacher is trying to offer us. Right. So for instance, you know, we'll get into it, but like the phaedo opens up in a certain way and like, Plato has chosen certain interlocutors for this, for this dialogue, and that probably means something. He has a kind of extended paragraph on like the myth of. Of Theseus. So what we've been trying to track as we've kind of moved through the dialogues and how to read Plato well, particularly for, like our first time readers of Plato that are kind of following along is one to take the drama seriously. Right. Plato was originally a dramatist. He burned all of his dramas upon meeting Socrates. And so he kind of. He chooses the settings, he chooses his words, particularly he chooses the interlocutors. And even understanding who the interlocutors are, because I think something that can throw us for a loop and something that even I have to really make sure I'm keeping in mind is that the arguments are tailored to the people he's talking to. So you kind of have to know who they are. And if they have a certain presupposition that's over here, he might be overemphasizing something to try and push them towards what's true. If you come in as a neutral or a third party, it might seem disproportionate. And so, yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts because these are some of the things we're trying to track.
- [07:25]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It's. It's difficult to do. Right. Like. Like with Aristotle, it is in some ways just. I mean, it's not just arguments, but they are, they are kind of first and foremost what, what one gets from Reading his text, it's a lot more difficult to know what's going on in Plato because of the dramatic elements, not just who he's choosing to have as the interlocutors. Right. A lot of times these were written many, many years after the events that are depicted. And his audience reading it will know what happened to these people in their lives. Right. Whether, you know, they lived virtuously or viciously and so on. There are the added difficulties of knowing the extent to which Plato is putting forth his own ideas, whether he's putting forth ideas that Socrates, the historical figure, held, whether he's putting forward ideas that neither he nor Socrates held, but they are just in some ways valuable to be put forward as arguments to think about. There isn't the sort of implicit commitment to claims being made that you'd get in a lot of texts where you're just making an argument and there's a presumption that the person making the argument believes, you know, and, and maintains all of the, the claims they're making. This is especially difficult as we're starting to go through the veto it lead. You know, it opens up one up to a lot more ambiguity in, in knowing precisely what's going on. They aren't the sort of texts where you can definitively say, yes, this is what he means and this is what's happening. I mean, this is in some sense true of any great book. There's going to be a lot of interpretations, but I think the number of reasonable things one can think after reading a Platonic dialogue is a lot higher than your average text.
- [09:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very much agree. No, I appreciate those insights. You kind of alluded to this earlier with your scholarships and in connection to the kind of the main purpose of the phaedo. But like, do you have a particular love for the phaedo or a particular way that you fell in love with it?
- [09:40]
Dr. Christopher Frey
So I mean, the reasons to fall in love with. I have been teaching the phaedo for many years now. So it's like a staple, not just in a class I was teaching, if I'm just teaching Plato, but just, you know, a standard history of ancient philosophy course, which is a sort of course I've been teaching almost every year for, geez, almost 20 years now. So it is this sort of text. I probably read it over 20 times now, and it's, it's rewarding every single time I do. So I mean, I just reread it this afternoon in preparation just, you know, to have things fresh in mind and there are things you notice that you didn't before, or things are brought into relief and become prominent in ways that you didn't appreciate before. And it, it rewards careful reflection, it rewards returning to it. And also, just as a piece of dramatic literature, it is incredibly well written and engaging. Not, not every Platonic dialogue is. Sometimes you'll get some where he's going through some really high level metaphysics and the, the prose gets really rough. This is a lovely depiction and it meshes so well with many of the other things you're reading. I mean, especially if you start, as many do, reading the Apology, the story of the trial and death of Socrates is pretty central to understanding either Socrates or Plato.
- [11:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. When you're going to teach this to your students, right, they're going to ask you like, you know, why should we read this? Or you're trying to like, set it up. Like how, how do you set up the phaedo for your students? Like, why is this a text worth reading?
- [11:20]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Well, um, it's not just, I mean, much of the dialogue is, as you mentioned, devoted to various arguments for the immortality of the soul. Right. For, especially for the soul persisting after death. And there's a way in which those are like, intrinsically interesting. This is a, this isn't just an abstract problem. I mean, this is an issue that I imagine most people have struggled with at some point in their lives, right? Death is a ineliminable feature of living a human life. Our mortality and what happens after we die is something that, although you may have beliefs about it and arguments for it or faith that certain things going to happen, the level of confidence you have is it's not 100 and so. And it's a great source of anxiety, right, for people trying to figure out what does happen after death. Does anything happen after death? Is the soul entirely eliminated? Is the soul the sort of thing that could persist and what it would be like afterwards? But one nice thing about the phaedo, and probably once we just start getting right into the text we should, is the, the general framing. I mean, he's not just giving arguments for the immortality of the soul for no reason, right? Part of it is that he's about to die. I mean, it's this day that it is happening. And so of course it's on the forefront of everyone's mind. But Socrates reaction to this imminent death is to everyone quite peculiar, right? He doesn't seem disturbed, he doesn't seem resentful despite whatever injustice brought him into this position. Not upset about death itself. And he'll say many curious things that in particular, the idea that living a philosophical life, in doing so, one has been the entire time preparing oneself for or even practicing or trying to become closer to death. Which even at the time would have sounded peculiar to everyone. Right. No one understood what this means. And so he puts forward a pretty remarkable overall picture of what a human life is, what we are, what. How we should be living this life, given that we are going to die. What our soul is, what its relationship is to bodies, like tons of material in a surprisingly small amount of space, given how much he deals.
- [13:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's amazing to me. One of the things I think that captured my imagination when I read it is here's the guy who's going to die, who is comforting everybody else. What is it that he knows? Right. That's actually giving him this inner tranquility, I think, too. He laughs.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Jokes.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he laughs. He's making jokes. He's playing with Fido's hair. So there's something here that what you think would be going on in this room is not. And I think that's really an invitation and understand what. What is happening. And maybe, maybe just to kind of dive into the text. How does this text open up? Because again, Plato the dramatist, Plato, the one that uses the setting as part of the pedagogy, immediately, like, we're not just getting the story, we're getting the story retold by one of the people to a third party. Like, what is he doing here in the. In the setting? Is there any kind of like, purpose to it?
- [14:55]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Most of the dialogues have some. Remove some distance between the actual events and the people telling the story. Here you've got, well, one odd thing. The person who wants to know this individual, the thought is that he is a Pythagorean. And the Pythagoreans thought a lot of weird and odd things. We don't need to get into all of them. But one of their main beliefs was what's called metam. Psychosis, that. That when you die, your soul is, I guess we call it now reincarnated into a different body. Maybe not another human body. It can go into animals or maybe even plants, depending on who says it. So the idea that souls can exist in some way after death and come to be present in a different body, that's already kind of a commitment that some people have, including this individual. One interesting thing is Plato makes, I mean, in writing this, his friend Phaedo, one of Socrates friends. Phaedo is the one saying, what happened. And he gives a long list of the people who were present at Socrates last moments. And Plato in writing this, makes the point of saying that he wasn't there there. There are only two times that Plato actually ever mentions whether he was at an event or not. The other one is an apology. He says he was there at the trial, but he wasn't here when. When played in Plato's last moments, he says it's because he was sick. There was a plague going through Athens at the time. What is the significance of this? I mean, a lot, as you can imagine. Sorry, I should maybe not preface every sentence I say with there's a lot of different interpretations because that will be true of just about everything we discuss. Some people think this, that Plato goes out of his way to mention that he's absent has some significance for the question I raised earlier, whether what he's writing in this dialogue is supposed to be in some way a presentation of what Socrates thought, or whether he's using Socrates as a mouthpiece for some of his own views. I'm not always interested in this question for every dialogue, sometimes I don't think it's that important. But one thing, one thing I have as a general come in. I think the Apology is likely the best text we have if we want to know what Socrates, the actual man, was like. And I think that's one of the reasons why Plato says he was actually present there, that he's an eyewitness to these events and so he could be more reliably. It's more liable to. To depend on what he says as representing what happened. But he isn't here at Socrates death. And it's. It, it's. If the soc. I mean, you already talked about the Apology, the Socrates of the Apology, he's very agnostic about what happens after we die. And he's like, I don't know if it'll be good, I don't know if it'll be bad. Only the gods know. You wouldn't imagine Socrates as he's depicted in the Apology, being fairly confident about him. What happens, that the souls are immortal, that he'd be someone who would give detailed arguments, bringing in a lot of metaphysical machinery to do so. A lot of people think here a lot of Plato's views are being put forward, right? There's a lot of appeals to forums, there's a lot of appeals to all sorts of views that Plato held elsewhere. So some people think just as far as the dramatic setup, Plato mentioning he's not there gives more room to recognize that a lot of Plato's abuse are coming through. I do also think it's interesting that the reason why he isn't there is because he's sick. Because one of the themes in this is what I'm sure we'll talk about quite a bit, is the. The kind of negative role that the body plays and in our lives and how it undermines our search for truth and knowledge. And one of the. One of the problems the body raises is that it does lead to illness. Right. And so this is an actual case where illness prevented Plato from being able to engage in something that probably would have been genuinely important to him, both to see his friend in his last moments and also, I mean, just to be part of those conversations and come to, you know, perhaps have a better grip or know better what the soul is and what will happen through him. And so I don't know if it's. If you call it amusing, but it is kind of. I don't think it's an accident that the reason given for his absences being sick that something bodily prevented this from happening.
- [19:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I 100% agree. No, I'm very glad that you. You brought that up, because Plato kind of removing himself from the dialogue somewhat makes sense, particularly if you understand, like, how he writes. But, yeah, just adding in there that it's because of an illness, particularly for this dialogue, I think has a lot of import. I like, too, what you said about the Pythagoreans at the beginning, because you. Because they have. That was something that I was struggling with when I read this is like how it seems like Plato is. Is flying some type of flag here. He's putting in details here to make us think of this other philosophy. And there's certain ways they harmonize. And I think too. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I also think the two main interlocutors of the dialogue, Simmias and Kibes or Cebes, also have Pythagorean sentiments. And so this really kind of colors the whole dialogue that he seems to be coming adjacent or wanting to bring into this. This other philosophy that also believes in immortality of the soul. And like, you know, is he building a bridge? Is there a critique here? But he's. He's certainly wanting, I think, his reader to hold these two together, it seems.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Yes. He wants Pythagoreanism in some sense to be, if not in the forefront of your mind, at least somewhere present in your thinking through these things. I mean, the views he puts forward aren't identical to what the Pythagoreans thought, the reasons he's giving are going to end up being his own. But it's closer to that position than many other philosophers held. And so, so I do think that's intentional. As you said, all of these choices are in some sense intentional. The dramatic choices.
- [21:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, okay, so speaking of the intentionality of a dramatic choice, he brings in the myth of Theseus here. Pretty heavy. This isn't like terribly surprising if you're kind of reading them in somewhat of a dramatic order. You know, when we looked at, you know, the credo, it's like, wait, why have they not killed him yet? Well, he's, he ends up getting this, like, month respite because he's condemned. And then, you know, just like, in short, Athens has this religious ceremony. So they're going to send this ship to Delos, and this is a sign of their gratitude towards Apollo. And it goes all the way back to the myth of Theseus, as when he arrived in town, Athens had to pay tribute. They had to pay tribute to Crete, and they paid tribute in the form of 14 young Athenians, right. They're sent on the ship and they go forward and they go to Crete and they're put in the labyrinth and they're eaten by the Minotaur. And so Theseus goes, he accompanies them. He, he arrives, he's aided by the princess. And if you remember the myth, they've got like this yarn that she gets from, I think Daedalus. And the yarn can go through the labyrinth to where the Minotaur is. Theseus defeats him, and then he can find his way out because of the yarn. I mean, from the. You know, I read this a long time ago, and then when I reread it now, kind of in our Platonic studies, it really stood out to me that this is not just mentioned. We get a whole, almost a whole paragraph of details here about the myth of Theseus. Any, any comments on what he's, why he's bringing this in?
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Let me, I don't know if I have thoughts about why. Why Theseus as a hero in particular is the one mentioned, except for the obvious reason that it's incredibly relevant to why he hadn't been executed yet. But it is important that he brings up not just Theseus, but poetry in general. Right. Like soon after this, he's saying, like he was spending his final moments creating first versifying Aesopian fables. And I think there's a way in which what Plato's doing is trying to present a different kind of hero in Socrates, distinct from the heroes of the traditional myths, distinct from the main protagonist in ancient Greek tragedies, one that actually manifests a certain kind of virtue that isn't present elsewhere. One thing that I'm sure you're aware of, Plato in many works, is not the biggest fan of poets. So in the Republic, it's a surprising amount of that text is devoted to how in the Best city you would censor poetry. But I don't think he hates poetry as such. He just doesn't want it to put forward as people, to emulate individuals that are vicious or act poorly. So he gets very upset, you know, reading Homer because you're supposed to respect the gods and think of them as divine. They act pretty poorly, right? Like they're, you know, lying and scheming and murdering and raping and doing terrible things. And on his list of things that he'd want to excise from poetry, I mean, he wants. He wants, if people are reading poetry, for it to help the student develop in virtue. And so you're trying to reinstill positive habits and orientations and get rid of the bad ones. And so, I mean, there's a long list, but, for example, a couple of them. He thought a lot of poetry led people to believe that death was a terrible thing, right? Depictions of what the underworld was like, people fearing death. Those sorts of passages in poetry you should eliminate. And here, certainly in the Phaedo, he's giving someone as an example that should, if you read it and accept what is said in this dialogue, that would lead the student reading this to have a much more positive attitude towards death that it could actually be, if you've lived your life a certain way, an end that one should desire, how one turns out. He'll also say that in bad poetry, the kind that you should eliminate, you shouldn't grieve misfortune and become overly emotional about it. And here you have again, Socrates is an exemplar, right? He rejects all sorts of external goods and things that would come for fortune. He's almost somewhat stoic in his orientation towards what almost everyone would describe as terrible. Something terrible that has happened to him. I mean, even early on, his wife, she goes. She's carrying on like most people in poetry and literature at the time would. She's crying and beating her chest, and they kick her out right away. Like, this isn't, you know, even at the end, when he's dying and people are crying, tells them to cut it out, right? Like that they need to, to get better control of their emotions. So I, I think. So this is a partial answer to question that, that he, he does appeal to both the sort of religious and mythic traditions that people generally accepted and also other kind of literature and poetry and fables. This is a different, what he's putting forward here should be viewed, I think, in contrast to those as presenting something not just different, but better. Better in the sense that it gives a better model of how to face death. One that if you accepted, would make you less anxious about what happens when you die and also would make you interested in living a better kind of life given the connection between how one lives and what happens after death. But I don't, I don't think I have any, any deep thought about why Theseus in particular was mentioned beyond, beyond its relevance to why his execution was stayed for, for a month, you know.
- [28:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Very good. I really appreciate, I really appreciate those insights. Just three thoughts on what you said. First, you know, my, my somewhat nascent, probably simple understanding of philosophy and poetry and Plato is, I do think there can be a knee jerk reaction that, that Plato does not appreciate poetry. He's railing against the poets and things like this. But then obviously we have to take a step back and be like, wait, how's he teaching us again? Oh, he's, he's teaching us in a drama, right? He's teaching us in a drama in which Socrates, the main character is constantly creating, you know, fables and myths and stories. So you know, my, my knee jerk reaction that I've had or my running thesis right now is that it's a poetry he kicks out against a poetry that is not subject to wisdom, that's not subject to philosophy. But a poetry that is subject to philosophy could habituate the polis to the proper lessons, right? And so I think that because you have to take Plato kind of at his word, like what he's actually doing in these dialogues. My second thought that I had on your comments as we try to explore like, you know, is there a pedagogical purpose more so than just like you know, with the Theseus myth about what's going on here? One is, is that it's really hard for me not to think about that. You know, this is a polis that's showing that it's, it's very much dedicated to myth. It's very much dedicated to the poetics. Right? The poetics are very much dominative in this political setting. So much so that the philosopher, you know, sitting in jail is way, it's Actually a myth. It's actually the. It's the poets that are actually controlling when the philosopher actually dies, right? He has this kind of respite. And I think there's, you know, it looks like in a lot of dialogues and a lot of Plato, you know, poetry and philosophy are both vying for the polis in a certain way. They're vying for who. Who is actually the instructor of human nature and wisdom. And it's hard. It's hard maybe not to see who's winning here when it's poetry that dominates the polis and. And philosophers in jail. And the third. The third thing that occurs to me necessarily doesn't occur to me that I. I'd like to bring up is Eva Brann has a thesis here on Theseus, I guess. And what she does is she aligns the 14 people along with Theseus that are taken to crete with the 14 named people that are in the dialogue, right? So she does. So how this play, I mean, I won't belabor this point, but how she does this, because I think this is kind of fascinating, is if you look, when it names the people, there's actually 15. And so you can play with it two ways. One is that Crito. Crito, the older man, is not mentioned by name for some reason, right? It just says his father. And so, again, no unnecessary details. So either you can omit him, either because he's not young, he's not one of the young ones, or because he's not named, he's unnamed for some reason. So you have 14 of these people. And so what she does is she plays off this. It actually tracks really well with you said, right? A new hero. And so Socrates, right, Is the hero going with these 14 people to slay the minotaur, to slay the monster, which is this fear of death, that. This is what the whole dialogue's about, this fear of death. And we'll see this several times, right? They cry, they weep, they need lullabies, they need all kinds of things because they're scared. And he's the hero, right? So I think it tracks really well with you said that there's a new type of hero that's. That's actually arisen. And she takes it so far as to even mention that, you know, Feedo. Where'd she go? What's Veto do? He's the princess. He's the one who's helping Theseus, right? He's the one that's actually helping him slay this fear of death. He's retelling the story.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Spreading the word.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he's spreading the word. Right. And so the, she kind of paints this whole dialogue as a labyrinth and they're trying to make their way without crying and screaming and everything else, to slay the Minotaur, you know, so it's.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
A beautiful fact he takes are definitely twists and turns and some dead ends and. Yes, right. So it's.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
She has like, she has like this, this little allegory at the beginning, which I think is. I'm always attracted these things. I, I kind of like the esoteric, allegorical read of things. So I, I draw, I'm drawn towards this. But I thought it was an interesting take on why he would give the Theseus myth.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, I hadn't, I hadn't, I hadn't read that piece. But it does sound fascinating. I will just say again, and I think we agree on this, that it's not, it's not poetry as such that's the enemy, but bad poetry. And this comes up later when he talks about misanthropy and mythology. Like there are some people that are bad and it will, if you have enough interactions with them, it'll lead you to think all human beings are. And mythology, that's the ology is locos. Argumentation that, that a lot of people, they get burned by bad arguments. They seem enticing at first, and then two days later you reflect and you're like, oh, why was I convinced? This is terrible. This happens again and again. And then you think the entire enterprise of careful argument and seeking the truth is bunk and what he calls you, a mythologist. And you could have the same attitude towards poetry as well. You just keep reading all of these tales in which they're just kind of putting forward vicious actions in a kind of way that leads you to be inclined towards mimicking that. Right. And then you think, oh, this, we should just eliminate it altogether. But there can be good poetry that isn't, you know, not just for its aesthetic qualities, but for actually presenting and putting forward figures that are to be emulated. I mean, I don't know if I agree with Plato that, you know, that we, that should be the standard. We judge literature by whether it's, it will help you grow in virtue. There's a lot of complications about, you know, anti heroes and so on. And there's, there's, I, I take among some of my favorite pieces of literature, ones that depict absolutely terrible people doing terrible things. So I, I, maybe I disagree with Plato there, but it, it is consistent with his thinking and and what you said about Theseus sounds plausible, though sometimes with the more esoteric ones, I judge. I judge those reading sometimes on just how interesting they are. Like, it's hard to. It's hard to know this. It's hard to know how to assess them for accuracy. But the things, as you said, they do parallel one another pretty well. That myth in particular.
- [34:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think it certainly invites us to a certain type of read that can certainly illuminate at least a particular thread, I guess, to use that term, throughout the dialogue. You mentioned, too, I mean, kind of pushing forward a bit. You mentioned too, earlier that his wife is there, and so they come. And this can kind of seem kind of cold to us, I think, Right. So his wife is there and, you know, some children, and then he's. He's kind of having them, you know, they're crying. They're having probably a normative reaction to a loved one having to die. And he actually, like, you know, pushes them out. It's like, no, my friends are here. Right. I think that, you know, I've seen this. I have a Sunday Great Books group. It's a group of men that come together once a month at my house to read. And, like, for a few of them, this, like, was a little jarring. Like, is this how we treat the family? Like, what. It was like, can you imagine dying and be like, excuse me, honey, please leave. My friends are here. Like, I'm going to die with them. Right? And so there's a kind of a common side here. I took it as. And maybe again, I'm. Maybe I'm searching too much for meaning. But I. I just take Plato, the teacher, very seriously. I'm like, no, I think there's a lesson here. And it's. It's interesting to me, too, that in certain ways I think she's a temptation, you know. So, for instance, the. The woman is very bodily, right? It's a very bodily concern. He's had. He's had children with her. Actually, one of the children is only like an infant. So this is not. Which goes into later these, like, does he truly hate the body? Right. Because that's. That's an impression you can get from certain passages. And I think we have to remember he just had a child. So there's a few things, you know, details that are given to us. But in certain ways, you know, her reaction and why she needs to leave. You know, in certain ways, I actually read this as a temptation, right? This is. This is the wrong view of death. This is the wrong view of death. And one thing I read, was curious about when I read the Phaedo is how solid is Socrates in his own belief about death, if that makes sense. He seems very solid. But then, you know, the wife has to leave. And then when the men start acting like the wife, they're having emotional reaction. Right. He chastises them. And that can be a funny scene. But I also kind of wonder behind the scenes, like, are they then serving as a temptation to him to have an emotional reaction that's contrary to his own views or for him to even collapse or his own views fall apart? Right. How much is maybe Socrates trying to even convince himself throughout the dialogue this is that he really can face death, you know, without fear. So that's just a quick thought I had on, on his wife there at the beginning.
- [37:16]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, I mean, some of the role the wife plays just has to do with the role wives play in general at Athens at the time where they, their, their primary domain is the home. And in general, they aren't out in the agora, the marketplace, engaging in these conversations. The only time in any Platonic dialogue that any woman is doing something even resembling philos and Symposium, when Dima teaches him about love, that's never there elsewhere. And I mean, what Plato, what he argues here that what one should be doing, the primary drive and goal that's in some sense guiding how one lives a good and flourishing human life, it is one that one's primary aim is the truth, and what you want is the possession of truth, knowledge. And he's not going to stop at the very end of his life and start, you know, engaging in a different kind of activity. I, I think he in. I think there's no better way he'd like to spend his last hours than engaging in philosophical conversation about an incredibly important topic that's of great practical importance at that very moment. I will say that that last point, this may come up more as we get towards the end, if we start going through some. There are many times in which Socrates will say things like that he's not 100% confident. Like he's open to being wrong sometimes, like, the argument isn't good, he would abandon it if anyone could refute him. But even towards the end, especially when he starts putting forward his own kind of mythological stories, he'll say things like, look, even if this isn't true, I think we should believe it and we'd be better off doing so. He makes this move several times in other dialogues. I didn't hear on your list of what you've read so far. But in the Mino, there's at one point which, when he, he's engaging Mino and Mino tries to give an argument that inquiry is impossible. I won't go through the details, but Plato's response, it's a wild story that involves reincarnation and it involves souls existing and involves this claim that comes up in the video as well, that we recollect things that were present in our souls before we were born. And at the end he's just like, look, I may not be correct in every detail of this, but if you accept my view, you'll be a better man than if you accept yours. Because if you think there's no inquiry, look at what your life is going to be. You aren't going to actually try and arrive at the truth. You're going to be lazy and live like you will be a better person if you actually live a life in which you're pursuing what's good and what's true, even if the argument for it isn't 100% right. So it's a weird kind of pragmatic consideration, like, maybe you're right, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. But if you, if you accept it, you're going to be so much better off than if you don't. Even if you end up being wrong, you'll still have lived a better life, even if what he says at the end of the day isn't, isn't true. But yeah, so I mean, when you get the, in the apology, the Socrates depicted there, he is very unclear about what will happen at death. Quite generally his wisdom consists, as you gone over, in the recognition that he doesn't have knowledge about matters of great importance. Here he is putting forward very clear views. Right. And giving pretty elaborate arguments for them. But he's still open to the idea that it may not be right with this caveat that even if he's wrong, it's still better to agree with him than, than to think that the soul just ceases to be at, at death.
- [41:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, your, your points remind me like if you read the end of the Republic with the myth of Ur, and then you have a myth at the end here, the Phaedo, and then you have a myth at the end of the Gorgias.
- [41:23]
Dr. Christopher Frey
There are myths all over the place.
- [41:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, they're all over the place. And so it is interesting that there is this notion of, you know, the story might not be 100% correct. You know, I'm not giving you, you know, some kind of religious vision of what Hades is. But there are principles here. And I actually recently read the Gorgias when I was. Our diaconate candidates for the diocese of Tulsa recently read the Gorgias because we have a great books program, which I think we're the only one in the country that actually has a great book sequence as part of our clerical formation. And I'll be honest with you, I loved that myth. The whole idea of how the tyrant beats a slave is how the unjust man beats his soul. And at judgment, your body goes away, and there's your ugly soul that you've beaten and abused and et cetera. I actually really liked it more than the one that's at the end of this one or at the. At the end of the Republic, at the myth of Ur. But then you can kind of take a step back. You do see, they're all playing off those same kind of core principles, if you will. The other thing you said, too, about that Socrates wants to sit here and he wants to talk with his friends at his death. This is what he loves doing. He. He also, in the apology, is hoping that's what he does for the rest of eternity. He's like, oh, man, this could be great. What if I get to go down with, like, Homer and everybody else, and I can, like, ask them all these questions, like he's going to go the gadfly in the afterlife as well, which really shows you, right? Like a certain love and beauty of a pursuit of truth, right? He. He wants to have that pursuit. So maybe, like, kind of pushing us forward. You mentioned that he is really interesting. He starts writing his own kind of, like poetry or putting Aesop, you know, to music. This is. This is something that's interesting from him. But he has this line in there, right, in which basically he's talking about this other poet and he says, tell him if he is wise to follow me as soon as possible, and his interlocutors, in my mind, and maybe I'm wrong, but this kind of kicks off the subject of death and immortality, because his interlocutors, I think it's. Kibi, says, hey, wait, what. What do you mean, like this? And it kind of raises interesting question that if death is a good. Like, if death is really a good. If that's a great thing, then should the philosopher just kill himself? Should we just have suicide? And so right off the bat, we have. This seems to be the transition into the subject of death and soul.
- [43:47]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I mean, there it's Already unusual that Socrates isn't afraid of death and is in good spirits, but that he's now making a larger claim that if everyone, if they lived a certain kind of life, the life he thinks is the, the best one to live, should in some ways desire death or welcome it, and would in some ways want to get there as soon as possible. Now, one that's already a big claim and it does raise the issue which they go in to discuss, like, well, if, if that's true, why wouldn't people just kill themselves to get there quickly? If you, if you care, like why he, he thinks that still wouldn't be permissible, but does lead them to the main topic of the dialogue. Because the entire position rests on the soul being immortal. Right. Because if it weren't, if it weren't the case, then it would undermine all sorts of views about why he thinks one shouldn't be afraid, why one should actually be embrace it with the kind of spirit of happiness that finally I get to die. So maybe to get into. We should just start just with. Before he gets into arguments for immortality, and they're very convoluted. He does just put forward his general picture of what the soul is and its relationship to the body and what happens at death. Right. So should we. We talk about.
- [45:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, jump into it. Let's go.
- [45:36]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. So. So Plato, Socrates has. They have a certain view. They have a certain view what the soul is. Everyone at the time thought the soul was the principle of life. If something's alive, it's because they're in souls. It's the primary cause of something being alive. But people had very different views about what did that. Right. Like some people thought it was a material element, some people thought it was a harmony or an attunement, or people thought it was a number. Any view you could have about what plays this role. Someone advanced Plato's view. I'm going to keep switching back between saying Plato and Socrates. Plato's view is that one should identify the soul with one's self, with what one really is. This comes up, you mentioned you read the Alcibiades. This comes up there. He's like, look, we have a soul, we have a body. The two are somehow combined. While we're alive on this world, which of those three are we? And he concludes that what we are, what a man is, is his soul, the thing which is dominant and rules over the body. And so he'll say things like moral claims, right, like. Or predicates, like it's. It's not I, the combination of body and soul, that is just or it's I have a just soul, right? Souls are just. It's a soul that's temperate. He'll say things like, not just on the ethical side, virtues, but like the cognitive side. It's the soul that knows, right? And it's even the soul that ultimately perceives. But really, you know, the first person pronoun, I, what does it pick out more than anything? What I am is my soul. That's his. That's the entry point to his view. But then when we are alive, it stands in some sort of relation to a body, right? It's what's responsible for my living body being such, being alive. And what role does the body play? As I'm sure you've noticed, it is not an entirely positive depiction, right? Because what our goal should be, what we should be trying to do as a philosopher, we should be trying to aim at the truth. The highest thing we could do is gain knowledge. And that's something that soul could do. The soul is what knows. Our bodies are in almost every way the greatest obstacle to actually achieving that. It's because we're embodied that we can't actually, in our lives, in this temporal world, get the kind of knowledge which he seeks. It's always going to be out of reach and as well as we'll see. He thinks if there's any chance of gaining knowledge, it would be after death. Because death is a separation of the soul from the body. And when you no longer have the body around undermining things, at least then you've got a chance that the soul could, could actually get what it's been seeking the whole time to get knowledge. But there are a lot of reasons, he goes on for pages about how many different ways the body prevents us from attaining what should be our end in life. Some of them are quite general, right? So like we've got 24 hours in a day. I'll just ask you, like, how many hours do you spend on average asleep? What is that? Like maybe you get eight. I get a little less than that these days. That cuts out what, a third of your life? You say, all right, how much time do you spend eating and preparing food? Go to the bathroom. It's a few more hours. How much of your time is spent working so that you can get the financial means to actually secure things like food? Now that's a really big chunk, right? We're already up to, you know, 22 hours of the day devoted to maintaining the body entirely directed towards keeping this thing functioning and going when we. Ideally we'd be spending 24 hours a day trying to find, you know, to gain knowledge. That's before even getting into general issues about disability and sickness. That. So that's one way it's an obstacle, but it's an obstacle in all sorts of other ways. I mean, there are two main areas of knowledge. There's knowledge, like practical knowledge about what's good to do and how to live, and there's theoretical knowledge about what's going on. And our body messes both of those up in the practical sense, the way the body messes up. At least in the phaedo, he says that the body is the source for most of our desires and feelings, pain, pleasure, appetites for sex and food and drink. And so the body imposes all sorts of motivations on us. Desires and hungers and bad motivations that lead people astray. This isn't an unusual point to make. Like, it's kind of a mainstay of a lot of ancient things, philosophy and medieval philosophy as well, that if you actually look out and see what guides people's lives, most often it's not knowledge. It's pretty rare. People have a different idea of what a flourishing life is. But some people think it's, you know, maximizing bodily pleasure. Some people think it's, you know, acquiring wealth or fame or honor or power. All of those are ends that are ultimately. That ultimately our body is responsible for imposing on us. And each of them lures us away and entices us away from what we should actually be doing. He'll even say, like, I think at some point even says, like, like every war, every revolution, every battle ultimately has bodies at their source. Because, you know, people are trying to acquire wealth and they're trying to acquire wealth to acquire luxuries. And the only reason they want luxuries is because of desires that have the body as the source. Right. So all sorts of human maladies of bad actions and things are bodily.
- [52:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I certainly agree. I think too. I mean, one thing that I would push into is a lot of people read this and walk away that Plato has a very, very negative view of the body. And particularly say, you know, Christians that are. That are used to reading, like the early church fathers and they're, they're in dialogue with the Gnostics, right? These. These people who, I think it's safe to say, hate the body. Or you think the Albigensians in the Middle Ages, right? These people that almost have, like a suicide cult. It's interesting to me though. I just don't know. Maybe again, maybe I'm just too much on Team Plato. He seems to say these things that are very negative about the body. But see, like you line up all these examples and you know, I don't think you hate the body, but you have an observation about the body, of how the body can be an impediment. Right. I mean, I'm, I almost didn't have this podcast because, you know, I've got five kids and half of them are throwing up the body.
- [53:13]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I've been there, right?
- [53:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So that means it's, you know, it's getting cold out. Like, you know, these things are starting to go through the school, et cetera. So it seems to me there's like a few things about this, this he does make a lot of negative comments about the body. I think if we take a step back and we don't do the knee jerk reaction, oh my gosh, this is Gnosticism. He hates the body. Etc and we look at actually some of the things that you mentioned, I think it kind of balances it out. I also think Plato gives us a few clues throughout the dialogue, right? So for instance, like that his wife was there, that they've recently had a child he's playing with, you know, Phaedo's hair and other dialogues. We see that Socrates, you know, will drink and can drink better than basically everyone else. So there's, there's some things here that like if you just say, no, he hates the body, it's like, well, I'm not sure that's true. If you actually look at some of the dramatic elements. Another thing too that I'm on the same notion is that, you know, as, as Christians, as Catholics, looking back on it, I actually think, I mean, think about how hard it would be to try and understand the relationship between soul and body and where these errors and where are these proclivities to errors come from. Without having a notion of the nature of sin, that your body is actually suffering a certain privation, right? So that's actually really hard. So if you think about Plato's trying to understand, like, no wonder he roots so many of the evils in the body without understanding that the body, say in the, say, original justice of Adam and Eve in the garden, the body would have functioned very differently. The body would not have been in a pediment, it would have been subject to the soul. So sometimes I kind of, again, maybe I'm too much on Team Plato, but I kind of want to give him a Pass here because I think what he's trying to observe by nature is actually very reasonable that the body does get in the way. And I don't think we should just knee jerk, say, oh yeah, this is Gnostic. This is where Gnosticism came from. It might be a variation of Platonism, but I don't think he's like that, if that makes sense.
- [55:05]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, well, when we turn to the role that the body plays in undermining theoretical knowledge, it might be even less sanguine that that might not be something where you say, oh, he doesn't hate the body so much. But here you are, right, that whether directly influenced by this text or just the general picture that it puts forward, a lot of people later have taken on broadly aesthetic orientations, right, where it's not just trying to find a moderate amount of pleasure in various things, but the elimination of pleasure altogether, where it leads even to, you know, practices of self flagellation and. And really viewing. There are times Plato just talks about the soul being a prison and enslaving us, where it's a lot more Manichean than you might think, right? Where you really just think of it as a source of negative things. It's imperfect and impure and always changing and you've got this soul there that if only it were freed, it could achieve what it really wants. And yeah, and so there is a way, I think what you say there, he does talk often about how what you should be doing is at least when it comes to these desires, living a virtuous and moderate life. That's not a life in which you eliminate all passion, but you don't want the passions and the pleasures, bodily pleasures, to play an outsized role where you're going to be pursuing them rather than what you should be pursuing, which is what's true and good. You know, take pleasure in what is pleasurable in a temperate and moderate way, but don't devote your life towards bodily things primarily. I think there is many people want Plato to hold a view like that because it actually seems like a slightly more reasonable view than one which is entirely antithetical towards everything bodily. Because I don't know if I. I mean, I am someone who's dedicated a large part of my life towards a philosophical life, as Plato would roughly describe it. Right. I spend way more time than the average person trying to tackle questions of great importance and try and come to gain knowledge about them. But there are plenty of things that occur in our lives that wouldn't occur if we weren't embodied and didn't have passions that do seem intrinsically good, good in themselves. Like, you know, the love I have for my wife and children, friendship and community. The joy that comes from just hearing like box Mass and B minor things like I, I wouldn't get on board if everything in which the body was involved and pleasure was involved and desires involved was automatically deemed a bad thing. I. It would be a bullet too hard to bite for me to just say, yes, I should, I shouldn't want any of those things. Just hit the books. Avoid all things bodily. So there are plenty of people who do read him in the more extreme way that nothing can come from the body and that it should be 100% devotion towards truth and knowledge. But as I think I'm with you in thinking there is present a slightly more moderate view in which he just thinks when it comes to bodily things, one should try and be virtuous where being virtuous isn't identical to complete annihilation or trying to get rid of it altogether. But it's not just the bodies being an obstacle to our highest ends. It's not just in the practical domain with all these desires. It's also going to prevent us from attaining theoretical knowledge. In part, this has to do with the, the means we employ for figuring out what the world is like, right? We're bodily creatures and we primarily engage with the world around us through our senses, he said. But our senses, they're terrible. Like they're liable to all sorts of errors. You can Never trust them 100%. They only give you like a partial and limited access to things. And being embodied is also an issue not just on how we gain knowledge about the world, but the objects of knowledge themselves. Right. So what we really want to know is what beauty is, for example, right? That's that. That would be knowledge. But the, our senses simply aren't the sort of thing that can present beauty itself to us. What it presents are beautiful particular material objects, but none of them is perfectly beautiful.
- [60:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
- [60:14]
Dr. Christopher Frey
If something's bodily, if something's material, it's subject to change, it's subject to destruction. It could be at one time beautiful and another time not. It's always going to be imperfect. And so it's. There's nothing in the world that should be the proper object of our, of our intellects versus like, I mean, what our soul wants are, is something, you could use different terminology, something entirely cognitive, something entirely intellectual. He says part of what it is to live a philosophical life is, I mean, says things like, you don't want to be dragged around by sense perception in your reasoning. You want to dissociate from sense perception and just use your intellect, pure and by itself. Right. As far as possible, from eyes and ears. Try and avoid the role the body plays in having you interact with the world because he thinks in general the body confuses the soul and it doesn't present the true objects of knowledge to you. And so I do think it's reasonable at least here to think that. That the view being put forward is as long as one is embodied, one's going to be prevented from getting perfect knowledge. You can get closer. It's better to pursue it. I mean, it's better to get closer than not. And as we'll see, he thinks it will put you in a position that in death you can maybe, perhaps actually attain the goal. But at least while we're embodied, it's an impossible end knowledge.
- [61:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. I think it's something. I think it's something maybe as we kind of work through this labyrinth, it's a yarn maybe to, to try and actually track and see. Because I have, I have questions too about, you know, you're right here at like 66A, he starts talking about pure thought and thought alone. And this is another. This is analogous to the question of the soul and the body, right. So how, how am I actually going to have my epistemology? How am I going to come to know things? And he says these things that sound almost like Cartesian, like I just need to go off somewhere quiet and be alone. But then when he gives examples later on of like, we'll see this with the, I think the argument of recollection, it's always really interesting where he says knowledge actually starts. And so this is one of those things where I'm kind of. I'm listening to him in the arguments, but then I'm also trying to kind of watch what's happening in the drama. Anything else that we need to pick up on before maybe we jump to his argument on the opposites?
- [62:42]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Sure. Well, let me just say, like, one thing. I don't know if this is new. It may just be summarizing things, but. But I mean, it does put forward a pretty, maybe not compelling picture, but a determinate picture. Right? Like what one is, is one soul. And in being embodied, one's prevented from. From fully realizing what one really is. Right. And so the more you associate with bodily things and the world which was revealed through the senses, so the more alienated you are from yourself, your true self. So, you know, the world, it's, it's a world of constant change and flux. Nothing's stable, nothing's permanent, everything's imperfect and impure and deficient. And as you see, for a lot of people, death doesn't amount to freedom from this world, like, because most people don't practice philosophy, which he thinks is a prerequisite from finally freeing oneself from bodies. So philosophy, it trains one to turn away from the world and towards what's pure and unchanging. And the soul itself, he thinks, belongs to this domain. So, so philosophy, it's not just a means of obtaining knowledge or wisdom, it's kind of a means to self actualization, right? To becoming what one truly is in the most complete manner possible for one in our unfortunate condition, the condition of being embodied. So only through death, the death of the philosopher, that the very goal of philosophy can be achieved. It's only through death that, that the philosopher can become him or herself completely. And, and this is, there's something compelling about this, right? Like you mentioned how some of the aesthetic elements, the anti body elements, manifested themselves in early church fathers and other traditions. But the picture, as I described it, it's something like this is present even in Aquinas, right, Where like, it's not until after death that you could gain knowledge of the most important thing there is through the beatific vision, right, that you can't have a positive conception of God's essence while you're alive, being a finite being. And he's got a very different view of the entire afterlife than Plato does. But it does share something like this, right, that there's something about our life now that prevents us from attaining the best, the best kind of happiness for us. It's kind of incomplete happiness, perfect happiness you could only get when you die and only if you live a certain kind of life while you live. And so at that level of generality, a lot of people hold a view. I mean, the details matter, but, but at some level of generality, it's pretty central to a lot of at least Christian outlooks.
- [65:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I think those track really well. And I think if we're looking for a positive side of Plato or sides of Plato that tend to echo well into later Christian thought, I mean, the fact that you say, well, we're body and soul, that's correct. But there's going to be a time where you are just a soul and not a body. And there will never be a time in which you are just a body without a soul. You know, another thing to keep in mind the beatific vision is a phenomenal example because not only do we finally have perfect happiness only, you know, after death, but the other thing too is that even when you have the beatific vision, the beatific vision is not mediated by the senses. Sense knowledge does not actually play into the beatific vision. Right. Because God, you don't have a phantasm of God. You don't have an image of God in your head. It's actually God. Right. It's this deep, deeply beautiful penetration in between creator and creature and the body.
- [66:20]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Intellectual cognition of an essence, or that's what you're after. Right?
- [66:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [66:24]
Dr. Christopher Frey
When you want to know anything.
- [66:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And it's even funny there where Aquinas tries to explain like, okay, great, after the general resurrection, what actually happens when you have your body, because you can't have like more of God than what you're, what you're getting. And so it's just like this kind of vague notion of, well, it's just more perfect because we're composite creatures and so we're more in attune with our nature. But we don't see the beatific vision is not mediated through the body. So there's certain things here where, you know, I think, I think Plato again is, is touching on things that I actually think might be more correct. And sometimes a knee jerk reaction would give him credit for.
- [67:00]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. But I mean, at this point, everyone's like, all right, this is a great, this is a great story. It would be wonderful if this was true. But none of this works if the soul isn't immortal, especially that it exists after death. That's the important part. Right. Because we're worried about how it happens after the soul is separated from the body. And so for most of the dialogue at this point, he's giving a series of arguments for the soul's immortality, at least four major ones. But there are other considerations that happen in the middle. And I doubt we can go through all of them in great detail because they do get very detailed and wild at times.
- [67:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Now let's take them. Which one would you like to jump to? And kind of. The first one he does. The first one he does is the argument of the opposites, right?
- [67:46]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah.
- [67:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Or the contraries. Yeah. So this, I mean, I don't know if there's one that you would really like to dig into. Great. If not, we can just kind of surface level it.
- [67:56]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I'm happy to surface level them. And then the ones that in my surface description you find compelling, I'm happy to go into any Detail you like, because there's some of these you could talk about for hours and out, like, they do get detailed. And, and some of them, I mean, I don't think you're supposed to come away with this thinking, oh, these are completely rock solid sound arguments. If there were such a thing for the immortality of the soul, that would have made good big news. Like, if you could, through arguments like these, have convincing, universally recognized arguments for the soul's immortality, that'd be great. So a lot of these things, like you said, if you're just focusing on arguments where you're numbering premises and getting a conclusion, there'll always be places where you can push and find some errors.
- [68:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And can I, can I push into that? Maybe a little bit. So maybe as a, as a intro into these arguments, I will tell you right now, like, the argument of the contrary is the opposites. Right? Well, don't, don't big things come from small things? Don't you know, don't hot things come from cold things? This one did not do it for me. Me, like, I just, and so my, my question is like, there's the argument itself, and I'd love to hear your ideas on that. But to you, what you said, you, you made something along the lines of like, well, you know, they're not, they're not exactly rock solid, not even supposed to be kind of airtight. So what it, what exactly is the pedagogical purpose of these arguments? Because you have to think that Socrates understands that they're not airtight as well. So, like, what, what is he actually doing in the dialogue with these types of arguments?
- [69:24]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, I mean, they're better and worse. And, and I, I do think certain things that are correct are revealed in them, even if they don't get you all the way to the conclusion. Like, even after giving the first two people are still in doubt. Right. And he's got to give the third, and people are still in doubt. Like they're, they still raise objections. So it's like a series of arguments that once you get towards the end, perhaps you're in a much better position than you were before, even if each of them on their own isn't meant to stand alone, but kind of like when all presented together and they're all pushing in one direction and he's able to eliminate contender positions and so on. That's in some sense, I don't know, some sense the best you can do for most arguments on most topics that matter to this extent. Right. It's difficult to come up with Arguments that everyone universally recognizes. Like when you're just mentioning Aquinas, plenty of, you know, he gave a lot of arguments for the essence of God. Plenty of people find holes or think they have. There's still value in giving these and giving more than one right. Collectively presenting them together. Yet I. The cyclical argument. Well, we can start there. I'll just say very briefly, right? It's a general idea that. That opposites change into their contrary. So this was generally thought a lot, especially among Presocratic philosophers and even later, right. There are certain kind of basic opposites. Hot and cold, wet and dry, heavy and light. And you see these as kind of the extremes of a continuum of change, right? So you've got maximum hot on one end, maximum cold on the other end. And there are lots of middle positions that you can occupy, right? And so whenever you're changing, you're changing. You're occupying one position on this continuum at one time, and then you change and you occupy a different one. But, like, that's what gives the structure, the continuum itself, with the opposites kind of serving as limits that help you understand what that kind of change is. You don't change from hot to black or something, right. There's no. There's no way to get from one to the other. You traverse in one of two directions, and each direction has a name. So it says there's going from somewhere on the hot side to something more on the right to the cold side that's heating. And if you move in the other direction on the continuum, that's cooling. And so he thinks this is when they're opposites and there's changes between opposites. That's how we understand it. You can go in one direction, you can go in the other direction. All right? And so he asks, all right, life's got an opposite. What's the opposite of life? Death. And we've got a name for moving in one direction from living to dying, from living, from life to death, that's dying. And so presumably there's going to be a change in the other direction from dying to living. And here, since death is a separation of body and soul, there's a way in which the soul can be separated from the body that's going one direction. The other direction is the soul being combined with the body. And so here he's thinking this is both an argument for the soul existing after it's separated from the body and also for the soul existing beforehand. Right. That there's just a kind of a fixed number of souls. They can come to be present in a certain body, and then on death, they leave. Maybe after you die, they come to be present in a different body. He's got lots of views about, you know, the kind of life you lead and what happens after. Right? Yeah. You know that you could be. The soul can be placed in a wolf's body or a bee's body. Sometimes it's not replaced at all, and it's just kind of material. And that's how you get ghosts roaming cemeteries. But he does think if you spent your entire life trying to get your soul detached from the body, then on death it may be entirely untethered, be able to move on. But the cyclical argument itself, I mean, it's kind of simple. Maybe the best opposite opposition he gives is being asleep and being awake. Like, if you're awake, there's falling asleep and there's the other direction, waking up. Right. And so you think of death as somehow analogous to going to sleep. Right. No longer being conscious or present and the soul coming to reanimate a new body is as analogous to awakening.
- [74:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [74:04]
Dr. Christopher Frey
You're not convinced by this? No, I. I am not.
- [74:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I am not. Uh, I mean, I think it. But I think maybe what I want to do is, you know, I don't like it when, you know, Socrates is not dumb. Plato's not dumb. They are the teachers, right? I mean, like, when you come in and you study these great texts. So, you know, my hesitancy here, like, when I don't really appreciate an argument, is not to be like, oh, see, you know, Plato's an idiot, et cetera. It really makes me step back and say, okay, I need to reevaluate. Like, what is the purpose of this? Right? So all things are judged, good or bad, according to their purpose. And so really, you know, maybe, maybe this is too simplistic. But in a certain way, I think everyone in this room knows that they're trying to philosophize about something that they can't actually get a rock solid answer on. Like, I. I don't actually think that, like. Like, can Socrates really sit here and be like, okay, guys, here's the syllogism about why the soul is immortal. Like, I think they're missing certain. Like, maybe this is a ceiling for philosophy, right? How much can the philosopher actually peer past the veil of death and actually be able to philosophize about this? So I think maybe one way, instead of saying, like, man, this is a dumb argument, like, why would anyone believe this? Like, why? Like, maybe it's more of like, we see the struggle, the challenge that they're trying to take right now. Like they're trying to philosophize about something that they. They can't see clearly. It's very dim, right? And so there's like this fog you think about, fog of war. This is the. The fog of death, I guess. And they're trying to see past it. And so I think what I'm trying to do is cultivate an appreciation for what is the argument trying to do, right? What is its purpose?
- [75:42]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Sure, It's. It's fascinating in this way, right? So it's unclear what happens after death once the soul is separated from it. But it should be equally mysterious how life comes to be at all. Right. And so a lot of people say, oh, no, look, life doesn't come from death. Life just comes from not life, right? You've got something not alive and then it comes to be alive. Why would you think that it has to come from death? Like a soul not present, right? Like, it's like death isn't an opposite of life. Death is its negation or something not alive or, you know, it's not, you know, there's a sense of which, like. Like, would you call a rock alive or dead? Like, you wouldn't call a rock dead. It seems like just an air being. It's not the sort of thing where it makes sense to say it's either alive or dead. It's just not alive. And so a lot of people say, well, why? That's the mistake. Life and death aren't opposites. The way life comes to be is from something being not alive. We got some inanimate stuff that's not alive. Not starting with something that was previously alive and is dead. You can go from not life to life. That's an incredibly difficult position to maintain. Like, just the question of. I mean, there's general issues. How does something come from nothing? How does life come from not life? Doesn't there have to be something present? But the role. I mean, that life exists at all is a remarkable thing. And how to understand the difference between the living and the inanimate, right? It's not easy to do. It's still not easy to do. I mean, we've got lots of views about how life develops and evolves it over time, but how life originates at all. And so it's not. If you think, all right, what does the soul do? It's the principle of life. It's literally whatever it is that causes something to be alive. It's not absurd to think that it has to be around before a new living thing comes to be, right? It's odd to think that the thing that would cause life would come to be at the exact same time as the living organism because you don't know where it came from, right? Like suddenly there's some inanimate matter and now it's alive, it's insouled. What story are you going to tell where souls can come to be out of what was previously entirely inanimate, right? I'm not saying this makes his argument good, but there it, it is situated within like a set of incredibly difficult questions. Now, now he gives an answer to this, right? There are all these inanimate bodies and the souls are something distinct and immaterial. And I don't know exactly how they interact with one another. But if you want to know what it is for something to come to be alive, one of these souls ends up standing in the right relation to an appropriate body, right? It's a coming together of soul and body. And now you've got a living organism and you could. And then you've got a story about what happens at death, that what came to be present when someone was born, it goes off on its own or enters another body. I don't know if all you need to do is talk about opposites and going both directions. That's enough evidence or that's a good enough argument to completely support this picture. But the picture he puts forward is answering a lot of important questions, right? Not just, not just what happens after we die, but how does life come to be in the first place? What role the soul is supposed to be playing with respect to life as a cause of something that was otherwise inanimate. Suddenly being part of a lit up body of a living organism and that, that you should, that you can't answer the question about what it is to die without simultaneously asking the question what it is to live and what it is to come to be as a living organism. You seem to be interrelated, right? Like, does that, does that make sense?
- [79:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, it does make sense. And I think that one of the things, I really like that you said again, sometimes it's, it's easy to sit back and like critique arguments and be like, well, that's dumb, that hasn't convinced me. But honestly, like, what are his options here? So he's trying to, he's trying to observe things that he sees, right? And again, this is kind of where he goes back to like sense knowledge and things like this, right? So he's, he's seeing that here's, here's some things we've observed in the natural order. Here are some things that we've seen. And he's like, would this be analogous? Is it more, does it make more sense that that's analogous to relationship between life and death than the belief that life just appears like ex nihilio, like the soul? The soul is just simply created uniquely at each point in which a new organism comes by, which is, you know, obviously on the Catholic side, that's what we believe. But like, if you had to make a philosophical argument that that's actually what happens as opposed to reincarnation or these kind of things, like, I guess what I'm trying to do is set him in this context of. This is a difficult question for philosophy to take up. And those of us who have the benefit of say, divine revelation, sometimes it's too easy to sit back and be like, this doesn't work whatever. But I don't think you have to take an appreciation for what he's trying to do in this argument, right? And I think it's very difficult and.
- [81:11]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It'S helpful because he takes on initially plausible and compelling alternatives, right? Like, not immediately here, but eventually he lets his interlocutors bring up objections and they bring up just a couple arguments later. A view that the soul is a harmony, right? You know, just like you attune the strings on a lyre and get sonorous music in if they're, if they're tightened in a certain ratio, right. Similarly, if all of the bodily elements are in the right proportions and related to other correctly, then you know, life is like sonorous malicious music, right? Like on that view, once you break the lyre, there's no more harmony, right? And so something like this is a view that many people hold. They would, I doubt they'd express it in terms about harmony. But the idea that what a living organism is just the same inanimate matter that's present anywhere else, that just happens to be combined and organized in a systematic way that enables us to do things like grow and reproduce and see. And not every view of the soul thinks of the soul as a separate kind of substance that you should identify as your true self that is invisible and can persist after death. You know, they think of life as just a certain way inanimate matter can be. That is a plausible view that I think is in some sense the majority view of most present day scientists in one way or the other. That could be a story about how life originates, right? Inanimate matter comes to be organized by whatever incredibly complicated mechanical principles are involved. You know, biomolecular principles involved. To. To get some inanimate matter in the right organization to sustain. To sustain vital activities. And then at death, the matter is no longer organized. It can no longer do the things that would be needed to do. And that's what death is. And there's nothing that was present before and nothing present after. It's entirely a story about different ways inanimate matter is organized over time.
- [83:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that. I like that a lot. I like you.
- [83:32]
Dr. Christopher Frey
And so he'll. Yeah, so. So he'll. He'll argue against this. Like, I mean, it's not as if he's thinking, oh, all I need to say is this stuff about opposites. But it does. It does. It does put into relief the importance of how the question about what happens when we die is intimately related to the question about how life comes to be. And that whatever you say about one, it's gonna carry over to the other. Right. In both directions. If you have a story about how life comes to be where it's just a bit about matter coming to be organized in a certain way, that you aren't going to believe that the soul is immortal. Because as soon as it's no longer organized that way, there's nothing. There's nothing there. Just like when you. You know, if you're a rock star and you break your guitar on stage, you can't play it anymore. Right. It's not like the harmony is. Went off somewhere else to. To go, come be present in a different guitar, that some luthier's making it somewhere else. Right.
- [84:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I actually really appreciate you kind of tethering that view of the soul's harmony to more of a modern view and seeing how those two are actually very analogous, because that makes me appreciate that a lot more, particularly for, like, modern and contemporary conversations. Because it's actually. And we'll kind of get there, but it was the one with a cloak that I thought was terribly clever. I actually really liked that. I thought that was a good argument. All right, everyone, that brings us to the end of this week's conversation on the Phaedo, the end of Part one. Next week, we will start part two of the Phaedo with the argument of recollection. In the meantime, join us at thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have our reading schedule and more information. We also have a library of written guides that you can find on our Patreon page. Check us out on X, Facebook, YouTube and other places. And we will see you next week. Thank you for joining us.