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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we are continuing our wonderful conversation on Plato's Phaedo or On the Soul. We continue with Dr. Christopher Frey, who's really done a remarkable job of taking these kind of complicated, convoluted arguments that we receive in the phaedo for the immortality of the soul and just kind of unpacking them for us, unfurling them, if you will. We're going to start this week's episode at the argument of recollection at 72e and then take on the major points of the rest of the dialogue. The argument from affinity, argument of final cause, the famous myth of the afterlife, and of course, the death of Socrates and his somewhat mysterious final statement. So again, the phaedo is a long dialogue. It's a complicated dialogue, but it's very, very beautiful and it's very much worth your time. I appreciate everyone who has joined us for these conversations on Plato. We continue to dig into our Platonic studies and have many, many good things ahead. So join us today for the second half of Plato's Phaedo with Dr. Christopher Frey.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Foreign.
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Podcast Host
The Great Books Podcast My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm a husband, father and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman.
- [01:19]
Podcast Host
Catholic Diocese of Tulsa.
- [01:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We're recording on a beautiful afternoon here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we are 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, the Crito, and now we are on the second half of Plato's Phaedo. You can check us out on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters who have access to our entire library of written guides, question answer guides on the Great Books, and also a community chat on Plato. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and just to check out more information about the podcast. Today we are discussing the second half of Plato's Phaedo or On the Soul. And we are joined again by 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 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 main area of research, he has secondary projects and occasionally publishes in the Philosophy of Perception and Mind, Metaphysics and philosophy of action. If you listen to last week's episode, Dr. Christopher Frey did an absolutely excellent job of taking some very complicated arguments in the phaedo and just kind of unpacking them for us, just kind of.
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Podcast Host
Laying them out and helping to be.
- [02:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
A really wonderful guide as we move this dialogue. There's a lot more complicated arguments in the second half of the phaedo, along with a myth and then kind of the mysterious final statement of Socrates. So we're going to discuss all of that and more. So join us today as we jump back into our conversation on the Phaedo with Dr. Christopher Frey.
- [03:06]
Podcast Host
Why don't we jump to the. The next one, the argument from recollection? Is that the next one you'd like to take on?
- [03:13]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Sure. I mean, I'm happy to talk about these for the next several hours. I don't know which ones you have. I mean, the recollection argument is a curious one. Later, people complain that at best, one can conclude from this argument that the soul exists before we come to be alive. But. And he talks a lot about this a lot in Mina, this is another time where he makes the claim that coming to know something, learning is actually recollecting or remembering something that was already present. So again, very quickly and roughly, he thinks that there are different ways to recollect something. General recollection is something's not present consciously in your mind, and then at a later time it is. Right. Like, so he says sometimes when you look at one object, that's an occasion, something else comes up in mind when you do so. So, you know, I could look at some sentimental object and remember the moment I received it. Right. You know, like, this is the stuffed animal my mother gave me when I was 3 or something. And I could think of her when I look at the object. But he thinks there's something. There's a. This. This kind of something being brought to mind happens quite generally for basically every perceptual experience we have. Whenever we see something, we can also, through that perceptual experience, recognize it's not an entirely perfect example. So, for example, I'm not going to use this example of the equal because it gets confusing. But he says this applies to all things. So he also mentioned this applies to beauty. So imagine you're at a museum and you're looking at painting and you're like, that's beautiful. You see its beauty, right? And then you look at a statue and you say, and you see its beauty. And you go outside on the veranda and you see the sunset that's happening at the time, and you say, that's beautiful, right? You have three perceptual experiences of three different things, and in each of them, you see something being beautiful. But we can all recognize that none of what we've seen is perfectly beautiful. There's always some way in which someone else might not view it that way, right? I get in disagreements with my wife all the time at a museum where I'm really taken by something's beauty and she's not. Or vice versa, right? Or disagreements like this. In order to make this judgment that something's imperfect, you need to have some standard or measure of perfection against which you're judging it. Like the very idea of perceiving an imperfection. You have to. You couldn't. You couldn't see something as imperfect unless you had at least some dim grip on what perfection would be or that perfection is something that's at least possible. And so he thinks when you see something imperfect, which is what happens when we see anything or perceive anything, the idea of a perfect version of it comes to mind. And when something comes to mind that wasn't there before, that's recollection. So whenever we see something, a worldly thing that's beautiful, we have in mind what beauty itself would be, perfect beauty. But then he says, well, look, where could we have ever even gotten that idea of perfect beauty? Because we just said that we can't get it from perception, right? Everything we've ever perceived, which is really the primary means we get to know anything in our embodied lives. The inputs are always imperfect, right? And so. And also you start. He says, you start perceiving the moment you're born, right? And so there would have been no time to do it either, right? That you're. You're beginning by. At the very beginning of life, from the very first moment, you're getting, you know, sensory experiences of imperfect things. And so he says, it's got to be there. It's got to be there before, right? That built into us somehow is an idea or a concept of perfect beauty. So that's why whenever we perceive something, we can correctly judge it to be imperfect and have a kind of standard in mind. So I feel that that was maybe too quick, but that's the rough. Their details also over. But that's, I think, roughly the argument given.
- [07:52]
Podcast Host
No, I really appreciate that. There's. I have two questions that kind of come to mind. One is, can we. Can we take this and compare it a little bit again, just kind of Getting into what Plato thinks, you know, earlier talked about pure thought, right? We just need to have pure thought and kind of. This goes back to the body, soul. This goes back to the body and soul relationship. You know, sense knowledge. We can't trust this. But it seems like even in your examples and even in his examples, they.
- [08:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All start with sense knowledge.
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Podcast Host
Like, it's not, you know, when he says, like, what's recollection? So he uses the two sticks, right? But even there, he's immediately calling together something that we've sensed. It's a picture, right? He doesn't say, okay, now think of equality and let's have this thought. He shows something that's part of the sense perception and says, okay, when you see. See this, you see two sticks that are equal, like you said, then you. They're not perfectly equal. There's nothing that's. That's so. But then we're kind of reminded. We have this recollection of, you know, the. The idea of things being equal. Does that. I mean, how it seems then that sense knowledge is actually part of this. And you think about. I mean, you think about the cave allegory. You think of the ladder of love. And you mentioned Diotima earlier. One of my favorite characters of his, right, Is foreign woman who comes in to teach all these Athenian men things. But even her, like, you know, what. What unlocks the soul to the ladder of love? Well, it's the body of the beloved. And first Alcibiades. What. When you say know yourself, how's that start? Well, you look at.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
You see yourself in the eyes of the lover. So I get what I'm trying to.
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Podcast Host
What I'm trying to reconcile in my head, which is probably a preliminary to this argument, is we get these things of, like, look, pure thought. Plato hates the body. He doesn't like sense knowledge. We're all waiting for Aristotle to come around and talk about sense knowledge. But then all of Plato's examples that lead up to the forms seem to start with our sense knowledge.
- [09:46]
Dr. Christopher Frey
That's in some sense where we have to start. Like. Like just to bring in the Symposium. Because all these are interconnected, right? Like you start. It's not as if the first things you engage aren't beautiful. It's not that it's not genuine beauty, because whatever beauty imperfect things have, they receive from the forms perfect beauty itself. But it's. It's a degraded kind of form. It's. It's. So you start with beautiful bodies and then care about beautiful souls and then beautiful city eventually you want to get to beauty itself. And beauty itself, like before you're, you know, going through greater and more perfect exemplars of beauty in the things we interact with. But to get to beauty itself, you have to leave any particular instance behind. Equality, equality is a tough one, but mathematics, it's helpful. So I usually like to think about circles, right? Like, have you ever seen a perfectly drawn circle before? You haven't, because they're always going to be like, take the magnifying glass and then maybe even the microscope going to be a little wavy around the edges, right? It's not actually, it's an imperfect circle and you can, you know, see circle after circle after circle. But sometimes you could never draw one because the circumference of the circle would always have a little width. Because if it's going to be visual at all, it's going to have to have some width. But it shouldn't, it should be a line, right? So we don't, we'd never, we'd never seen a perfect circle. We couldn't see a perfect circle, but we know what a perfect circle is. You go to a geometry class, you can have a definition, right? I know, it's like a two dimensional planar figure. Every point is equidistant from one point, right? Like you don't, you don't see circles, you cognize a circle. It's an act of intellect. The intellect comes to understand the definition of a circle and the definition somehow captures the essence of a circle, right? Like you can come to know what circles are. And maybe there's a similar journey to the ladder of love that you, you start by actually seeing drawn circles, none of them which are perfect. And from them you can, you know, get an idea of what a perfect circle would be. But there's a question, where did the idea of the perfect circle come from? Because you've never seen it, right? Like you would say the perfect, you had an idea of the perfect circle the whole time you could only know what a circle is. You can never see what a circle is. And if through seeing lots of circles, it brings to mind what a real circle is, well, that's recollection. Any, anytime something wasn't present in your mind and then comes to be present in your mind, if it wasn't jammed in there through sense experience, it was there already, which, you know, you know, I mean, this is related to a lot of later views about just innate knowledge and whether there are certain ideas kind of just built into us from the beginning, right? But, but he, but, but he thinks this is at least a good argument for the soul existing before we were born because it would have to be to get loaded up with all of these ideas of perfect things.
- [13:13]
Podcast Host
Right. Can you help me understand, though? Like, so my second question. I like the sense knowledge because I think sometimes, again, and maybe I'm. I'm. I don't tend to like what I see as the antagonistic or caricature differences between Plato and Aristotle because I think they share a lot more than they have distinct. And while Plato talks about pure thought, it just seems that the sense. It's not that sense knowledge has nothing to offer us. It seems like it's ubiquitous and in how we actually come, you know, to even know the forms and things. It's part of it. He doesn't emphasize it and he says things like pure thought that tend to devalue it. But it's there, right? It has a role, which means the body has a role. Right. That would mean if the sense knowledge has a role in our path to wisdom, even if it's a minimal one, then the body has some kind of role. Right? Because your sense knowledge body can't be separated.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Correct. So the body has a role. So the body has a role in, in some sense bringing the proper objects of knowledge into mind. But the body can't ever in itself present us with those objects. Right. Like, we can't see the, the proper objects of knowledge, but we could in some sense come to know. Well, to the extent that we can know anything. You start, you know, I mean, this happens all the time, and this is maybe close to Aristotle. Like, we want to, you know, we want to know what a Bengal tiger is. What do you do? Well, you go out and you look at one, and then you look at another, and then you look at another and like, you start engaging with the senses. You can come up with an idea of like, what is it to be a Bengal tiger that kind of abstracts away from all the individual instances and is something kind of general, like at the level of species. And so, yeah, I mean, he thinks sense experience plays a very important role in one's coming to have knowledge of what's essential to something, what something is. With Plato, yeah. Like, as we mentioned with the latter, you start, you know, loving bodily things. And if you, you could stop there, right? Just like you could just look at beautiful objects and not care about beauty itself. Right. But you can proceed and come to know. So, but, but the body can't present you with the objects of knowledge themselves. And the body's also going to limit you from ever getting perfect knowledge of them. Right. Like, it provides the initial impetus towards, and in some ways a means towards gaining whatever knowledge we can of things. But it can't give us that knowledge directly. And it's going to prevent us from ever getting the knowledge completely. It's only after the soul has no more bodily influence on it that it could ever know what beauty itself is. Because you'll notice, even in Symposium, Socrates is very clear that he doesn't have knowledge of beauty itself. Right. I'm pretty convinced it's hard to. It. There's a. There's a lot of evidence to think that Socrates or Plato or some intersection of the two think that knowledge isn't something that human beings are capable of acquiring. Though you could move in a direction towards it, you can progress towards it, and that will involve the senses. But at a certain point, you want to leave the senses behind, just focus on the thing itself. And when you try and do that, the body's always going to throttle this pursuit in some. In some way. It's gonna. It would be nice if we could, through the senses, see essences of things, you know, like angelic cognition of something like the intellect, just grasp, you know, directly grasping what it is to be a certain thing. That would be lovely. But we can't do that, and our senses can never provide it. We can emphasize our intellects and use them as well as we can, using sensation as the starting point, but they aren't going to be sufficient on their own to give us that. But we do, just through perceiving, have some inkling that there are perfect versions. And just. Just that we've got the idea of perfect beauty itself. We don't have perfect knowledge of it, but just that the idea is there at all. He thinks had to come from somewhere. And you couldn't build that up just from the materials that the senses bring, can we?
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Podcast Host
I really appreciate that. I appreciate the clarity and the kind of structure that you've given to that. I have another question, though, about the argument of recollection, because it seems like there's a jump. And what I mean by that is like, okay, so let's go back to your example. So you're at the museum and you're looking at multiple beautiful things. And so. But none of them are perfectly beautiful. And so I then have to have this idea that's judging these things. And so this is an argument for the idea of beauty, the. That the beauty itself is perfect. Idea of beauty.
- [18:15]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah.
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Podcast Host
But okay, that's one relationship. But then to jump and say, okay, well, that means I have to remember it from a prior life. See, he's making another argument there. So I guess my point is, I want to point out, or I'd like to put forward a thesis that holding to the Platonic ideas is a distinct argument from recollection. Those are actually two separate things. Because you have in the Christian tradition, St. Augustine, to a certain extent, I think of St. Maximus the Confessor, that are going to hold to the ideas. The ideas end up being in the divine mind. So for instance, when St. Augustine goes and sees beautiful things and it's reminding him, or what it's participating in is beauty itself, he, he. The whole system can happen without it having to be recollection. So that, that's a. There's two distinct things there, right?
- [19:11]
Dr. Christopher Frey
They were, There were other options available to where these ideas came. Like you could, let's say you followed play Plato's argument a long way down the path. A lot of people get off the train way early on, right? But if you've already got the forms and all this, the Barrett, you know, it's just that if you say, hey, we have certain ideas, we couldn't get them from sense experience. The option, the only option he kind of takes seriously as a candidate where they came from is they were already there, already in our souls before they came to be embodied. That's not the only option, though. You mentioned one interesting thing is this is more or less the same exact argument Descartes gives for God's existence in Meditation 3. His was, we've got, we have a concept, we all have it of Aquinas will deny that. But a concept of a absolutely perfect being, infinite along every possible dimension that something could be. And his view is, well, look, how did we get an idea of the infinite and we couldn't get it through the senses? Because everything, the senses prevents us is limited and finite, right? There's no way you could jump from. You could never. There's no way to get the idea of something infinite or perfect from experience. But his view is that God stamped himself on our minds at creation almost like a, like a copyright or something. Just like, look, I'm going to create you and in doing so, I'm going to put the idea of myself, the Creator, in you from the beginning, right? That's a different story about how a certain idea got into us. But it is similar. They're like, look, we have certain ideas and we couldn't get these ideas through Bodily means, right? Or the means we seem to have available to us while living. They had to come from somewhere. Plato's answer is they were already there. They were in your soul before you were even born. There are other options, right? So it could be that the soul was created the moment you came to be alive. Right. And that the creator of this put certain ideas in you say the form of beauty and the form of the good and maybe the form of himself as the Creator, or that they're only present in a single divine mind. I mean, there are lots of. I'm sorry, this is a long way of saying, I think you're correct, that a jump is being made to the recollection.
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Podcast Host
Maybe jump's the wrong word. It's just, it's just that it's sure he's made a certain choice, right? So he, he sees how this can play out with the forms, with the, with the eternal ideas. But then he takes a certain route. And I guess all I want to highlight here is, is that later Platonic thought will take a different route, you know, so for instance, like St. Augustine finally gives the ideas a metaphysical address of the divine mind. And that's. So then this whole thing can happen without having to imply a recollection or pre existence of souls. And so I just want to make that distinction because I think that's important kind of looking the larger thought of the Platonic corpus. Do we want to push forward to the next argument?
- [22:20]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, I mean, the next argument isn't. I mean, I don't know if even it, if you could call it an argument. It's usually called the affinity argument, the 78B, where it just goes through a lot of features of worldly things and what these forms would be like. And it turns out the soul seems like it would be a lot more. Have more affinity, seem more analogous to things like forms. Right. So, you know, if you think one of the primary features of worldly things is that they're capable of change, right. And he thinks anything that changes is somehow composite. Right. It's either a breaking apart of something, something that's absolutely simple, couldn't change. You'd need some part that remains the same and another part that changes. Right. If something's completely simple, it would just like have to be, cease to be, and something new would come to be here. And so the very idea of change involves some sort of complexity, but beauty itself doesn't change. That's permanent. It has to be something simple. It would have to be something that isn't visible. Right. That there's like a long list of attributes that he attributes to what these proper objects of knowledge are. And I mean, to the extent that this is an argument, it's. I mean, he asked the question like, to which class of existence do we say that body is more alike and to which one soul? Yeah, I think, I mean, his conclusion from this ADB Is that, you know, the soul. The soul is most like that which is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble and ever self consistent and invariable. We're. His body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, dissoluble and never self consistent. Right. He's just trying to show that there's an affinity between the proper objects that the soul comes to know and the soul as the kind of thing that could know them. Right. That, that, that these two things, if they're ever going to connect in this knowledge relationship, they're going to have to in some sense be on one side of this class. The things that change and the things that. In a way.
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Podcast Host
What did you take of. He has this kind of really powerful imagery. Where is this? This is at 83D, where he says, because every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. I mean, this is just talking about. How should I put this? It's. This is one of the difficulties of living a philosophical life. Right. One where you're supposed to not focus on bodily things. Right. And emphasize reason on its own. It's hard to not pay attention to painful experiences. Right. Like they're as vivid as any. Anything can be the sort of conscious appreciation of pain. Like it's overwhelming. Right. Pleasures as well. Like it's. It's difficult to. To redirect one's attention from certain bodily things. But every time you focus on the body, you're more habituated to care about the body. It says it's like, yeah, as you said, another rivet each. Each time, each. You know, like if you're going with the negative model where you're thinking of the body as a prison, it's in a especially nefarious prison because it's the kind of prison that, like the chains tighten the longer you're there. Like, like it's a prison that reinforces your servitude because once you're embodied, the body does everything to make you continue to focus on it and continue to have it be the thing that you care about most. It's not surprising that so many people pursue bodily pleasures over all else, right. It's not surprising that people are vicious and, like, if there's some conflict between your bodily desires and what, right. Reason says you should do that, you go with the desires. Like, it's kind of overwhelming, right? So, yeah, it's. It's. Yeah, another. Yeah, it's another nail to rivet the soul to the body and weld them together and it makes the soul corporeal. Like it. You're sullying your soul with something. Something quite unlike it. Like your soul's natural place is with the forms themselves. It. You know, in some ways it is itself not a body. It is simple, it is unchanging in a way. And it happens to be at any given moment, we're, like, tied to a body, and yet the body is doing everything it can to keep it attached and make that attachment stronger and stronger and stronger. It takes incredibly will to be virtuous. It takes incredible will to care primarily about truth over power or honor or fame or pleasure or any other worldly end. It's nefarious.
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Podcast Host
It's very nefarious. It reminds me too, in a lot of ways of the warnings of St. Paul, right, where he takes the sin nature and calls it the flesh. If you continue to feed the flesh, if you continue. Right. To live a life of the flesh, then that's what dominates. And I think both St. Paul and Plato there are drawing from similar observations simply about just human nature and how we conduct ourselves. You see this too with Aristotle, right? What have I built a habit towards and then to try and break that habit. So really, when you look at vice as a bad habit, that riveting image is amazing because it's like, yeah, every time I do this action, I'm riveting my soul to the flesh. And in a certain way, my soul then is becoming unnatural, right? There's. It's taking on a certain unnatural effect, as he says.
- [28:17]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It's. The body begins to rule over the soul instead of the other direction, right? And that's what you get in trouble. Like. Like the body is the divine element. It should be the ruling element. It's. But the body does everything to usurp that, right? And the more you indulge in it, the more easily it's able to achieve that. Sorry, I'm personifying these things, talking about the body's aims and so on, but.
- [28:42]
Podcast Host
I. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it pulls up that theme. And whether It's Plato or St. Paul, I mean, we've seen this reflected on over and over, you know, by great thinkers. Because again, this goes back to all those conversations that you mentioned earlier and all those fantastic examples of how much the body can get in the way. And it's even, sometimes the body, we even treat it like a, like an artifact. We treat it like something separate from us, right? Like, well, I would like to do this, I want to do this, but I'm too tired, or my body says no, or I need that second cupcake, or, you know, whatever it is. And so we. It's funny how we even talk about ourselves as the soul.
- [29:17]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It seems like an external imposition from something.
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Podcast Host
Right.
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Dr. Christopher Frey
Foreign. I mean, that there's a long tradition in ancient Greek literature talking about a lot of emotions as feeling like external impositions. But, you know, Plato himself will talk about love in terms of divine madness, as if it's something coming from without and taking over. So, so it can feel like it can't be like this, like a constricting or reinforcing influence. And in both the alphabeties, which you mentioned before and also in the veto here, he talks quite a bit about what should be ruling and what should be ruled and what is master and what is divine and what is controlling. And part of living a philosophical life is putting reason in the driver's seat that that's what should be governing what you do. Whereas most people are influenced in the other direction. And it's not surprising there's a way in which the body is so successful that it's almost the default, right, that, that people are doing bodily things. It's quite an achievement to live a philosophical life, right, of the kind of Socrates is describing. Well, I mean, it's here where he talks about what happens to all the people that don't, right? They, you know, they're too tied to bodily things. They can be reincarnated as bees or wolves or ghosts or so on.
- [30:39]
Podcast Host
Well, even, even I think the, the drama right here, right, is it's not a microcosm of that whole thing, right? He's the philosopher, he's la. The face of death, etc, and those around him are weeping and crying and sad, and they're too, they're still too sunk. They're too mired in that bodily. I just think that riveting section is probably one of the most powerful images that he gives. And so I really appreciate you forcing that out.
- [31:03]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I mean, as you said before, like, you don't, you don't think he has an entirely negative picture of the body, but he does talk about the body as a prison. He does talk about it as polluting things, right? Like, I. I take him at his word to some extent that maybe, maybe you don't have to say that everything bodily is bad, but it. It's certainly. It's certainly preventing you from achieving what you want, and it's constantly sending up distractions or impediments or obstacles to that there. It takes a lot of discipline to persist in virtue. Even if you've developed habits. There's always. The body's always lurking, presenting new delights and desires that one has to be to build resolve against and to keep reason in control.
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Podcast Host
No, I 100% agree. I think that, you know, one of the things I found myself as a father telling my children is it is really hard to be virtuous. If you're sleepy, it's like, kids, you need to go get some sleep. You need to go to bed. It's kind of interesting, right, because we don't think about, like, sleep as, like, a important element of the moral life. But if you. If you wake up and you haven't had enough sleep, your body's irritated, then it's difficult, you know, to have that. That excellence, that moral excellence. So, no, I appreciate you kind of parsing that out for us. Let's look at this kind of next section where, if I understand correctly, the two interlocutors, right, Simmias and Kibis both kind of give their questions that they currently have. And I actually really. I really liked this. I thought this was a great little pushback. So this starts at.
- [32:41]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, usually people get frustrated because, like, people agree with Socrates too readily. They're just like, absolutely, of course. And they're like. And you're like, wait a minute, I'm not on board. Like, slow down and stuff. I've got some objections. But, yeah, this is what I was mentioning before when they were. They're giving an alternative picture of what's happening. So initially, it's what I was describing as the harmony view of soul. Right. This would be. This would incorporate a lot of the features that Plato's argued that the soul has, right? That it's not itself something that's visible, for example. Right. What's visible are the. Is whatever material bodies are in the right relationship. It kind of emerges from underlying physical relationships among things. And the second interlocutor, he develops this view further. He'll say something like, look, I could even agree with you. Like, they're taking on certain things, Plato says, and still pushing back. So he says, all right, well, look, there's a way in which the soul does seem like it's the sort of thing that could persist through changes in the body, right? Like the body changes and the soul remains the same. And what's interesting about the, the counter proposal he put forward, he's like, look, this happens all the time during life, right? The material that's in my body presently, most of it wasn't around when I was a child, right. I'm constantly sloughing off all sorts of matter, and that's why you need to keep eating, to like, put in new matter. So, like, of course we have new bodies all the time, right? And the soul persists. But. So you could say, sure, the soul outlives the body. But there's nothing in his arguments, they, they say that would prevent that, would keep that going on forever. Like, why couldn't there be a last time? Which, like, the soul does eventually wear out, right? It. It outlasts one body, it lasts another body, but at a certain point it just ceases to be at a time when the body it's attached to also ceases to be. Does that sound right?
- [35:02]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I really like. I really liked. Yeah. I mean, just two thoughts. One on the Liar. I really appreciated you earlier tethering that to, like, the default view of modern man, because when I read the Liar one, I was like, well, this isn't going to go anywhere because on this one, the soul is the effect of the body. It's the body coming together that kind of creates the soul. And so I was like, well, this isn't, this isn't going to work, right? Because the harmony of the instrument is an effect of the instrument. And. And so I just kind of stopped there in my head. I was just like, okay, this one doesn't work. Move on. I really appreciated you kind of tethering that to like. No, that's actually kind of the default kind of materialistic view.
- [35:42]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Like one of the. Depending on how you read them, like Empedocles was what it said, we're made up of earth, air, water and fire in certain ratios. Right? That the ratio, the proportion things are in is like a harmony. You got, you got three parts blood, sorry, three parts fire, two parts water, one part earth. That's flesh. And another ratio would be bone. And like, it's when things are organized in the right way that things. Things come to be. What you said is the primary way that Socrates pushes back against these views that to be ensouled is ultimately explained in terms of how matter is rather than the Other way around. Right. That, that if you want something to be alive. On this Harmony View, life is actually a property of bodies. Like it's a feature of bodies. It's explained by bodies. All you have to do is talk about inanimate bodies and how they're related. And that's what's ultimately going to explain whether a soul is or isn't present, whether something is or isn't alive. And he's thinking that gets the order of explanation entirely in the wrong direction. Where it's the soul that should be explaining why the bodies are alive and not the bodies explaining why a soul is present. Right. Why there's, um. Now again, that would probably not be convincing to a contemporary biologist down the hallway and the, the, the department down the road, but that is something he's kind of committed to here.
- [37:17]
Podcast Host
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Can we look at around 88C where he talks about this, this hatred of logos.
- [37:26]
Dr. Christopher Frey
We got the mythology where it's like misanthropy. Yeah, yeah.
- [37:32]
Podcast Host
What's he doing here? I mean, this was kind of a. I thought this was a fascinating kind of little side comment of his.
- [37:38]
Dr. Christopher Frey
He does go on these just. I don't know if you'd call them tangents, but like he has later discussion, a nice tangent on Anaxagoras and what kind of explanations would actually be satisfying and why he doesn't do physical science anymore, even though he tried. This is one of these. Yeah. Starting around 88C, but, but kind of coming, kind of coming to a head around 89 D&E. Like there's a frustration that you can have. Right. Dealing with Socrates, for example, there are a lot of arguments that seem to be compelling and upon further reflection, you recognize that they aren't good. This is something he does to plenty of people when he's interrogating them. They come up with an accounted definition of what piety is. And then he says why it's wrong and they come up with another definition and he shows them why that's wrong and so on. And there are plenty of things we've been convinced of before and later on we realize, oh, why was I convinced from that? And this can happen in a discussion like this. Right. Like, all these people at some point found the Harmony view incredibly compelling because people do give compelling arguments like this. Like, and now they're just like, well, for a lot of my life I thought this sounded like a reasonable view. And now I've talked to you, Socrates, and now I could see good reasons why one shouldn't Accept it. And if you, if this happens to you, how do you respond? One response is to distrust all arguments, right? Because arguments can be wrong and even arguments that seem incredibly compelling can be wrong. Like, so if you say, look, look, I'm in a situation, I've argued for something, and it seems for all the world that this is correct. How could you trust that's the case? Because haven't you been in that situation before and you found out it was wrong. Like, what would it actually take for you to be confident in any argument, given the track record arguments have had, right? And he doesn't want this. He doesn't want people adopt this view. She calls mythology a hatred of the logos, of logical argumentation. And he does make an analogy to misanthropy, right? Like if there's someone that you engage with and put your trust in and befriend and they betray you, right? And then that happens again and again. At a certain point, you could, in response, adopt a certain viewpoint about all mankind. Like, I've been burned too many times. I'm not dealing with people at all, right? I hate all. You know, could have the same attitude towards arguments. Like, I'm done with arguments. This entire enterprise of trying to argue with things like, I've been tricked so many times by con men and sophists. I. And. But he tries to make the case for both that you shouldn't take that attitude, right? That. So this is towards the end of this discussion, around 89D says that we should not become misologs as people become misanthropes, right? There's no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse. And he thinks they arise in the same way, says misanthrope becomes. When a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound and trustworthy, then a short time after, he finds him wicked and unreliable, and then happens in another case, and it happens frequently. And that's, you know, you've seen this happen. But he says in some sense that the incredibly good and the incredibly wicked are very rare. Like, if you've had a few experiences with incredibly wicked people, you shouldn't conclude from that that all of humanity is irredeemable and is naturally bad. And this can happen with arguments as well. There are very few incredibly bad arguments and very few incredibly good arguments. Most of the arguments are in the middle and have some good things and some bad things. There's a way of just recognizing that general landscape with respect to people. Like there's some saints and some villains and most of us just struggling. In the meantime, there's some terrible arguments and great ones and a lot in the middle. You don't give up on humanity because of the few evil ones that you've encountered or the times in which people have acted incredibly unjustly towards you. He thinks the same thing should happen with arguments. You shouldn't give up on argumentation as such because actually thinks that's the best way we have available to us to arrive at the truth and knowledge to the extent that we can get it right. Like.
- [42:23]
Podcast Host
No, I really liked it. I thought it was a great. I thought it was a great comparison. I really did, and I. I liked it. Maybe I might be pushing it a little bit more outside his original context, but like this, this is where, when I read it, I thought of modern man. Like, how. Because like, you think about how many people now are just completely turned off to any kind of argument. Any kind of actual logos, like, they're just. They've been habituated, whether they've been burned, which I think is an interesting idea, or whether they've just really fallen to a comfort of just an emotive way of communicating and an emotive way of making decisions. But you think you run into people like this where you're like, you know, you know, we get. In these national debates about things. We get you like, okay, let's. Let's talk about it. And you can't, like, they don't want to hear an argument. And so I re. I really liked this kind of, like, kind of sidestep that he did here because I think it's another wonderful insight into human nature.
- [43:13]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It comes up in all sorts of, like, you could imagine someone who's so disillusioned, say, with political figures. You know, everybody's acting in their own self interest. No one cares about the common good or actually justice or anything, and just give up on the idea of human community altogether. I like the idea that, you know, that human beings could actually do this. Well, it's a. That's a political variant of misanthropy where you just view human. Human enterprise of collectively living together as something that's not going to work or something just because you've seen it go so poorly so many times. Yeah, but he really doesn't want what he's calling mythology. Mythology. The abandonment or the distrust on argument itself. Because you can imagine just someone even reading this dialogue. These are confusing arguments. Some of them aren't great. Other arguments that seemed good turn out not to be great. And you might at the end of the day just throw up your hands and just be like, I have no idea. Like, I've been frustrated before trying to work out a problem. I've been time. There have been times where like something that seemed really clear to me, I realized later I was just missing obvious things. You, you could have the reaction just like, what am I doing? Like, there's no way I'm going to be successful in this at all and give something else. You know, just say, why aren't I just pursuing pleasure or something else.
- [44:43]
Podcast Host
And sometimes I think Plato is a particular temptation to this for some people. And maybe even the phaedo is itself where, you know, we're not even moving towards a. Like you're at the end, you're not even going to be rewarded with a black and white answer. Right. And you think about like the euthyphro, like, so the first time people read the euthyphro, sometimes they get very frustrated or even first Alcibiades, he asks Alcibiades, like, well, do you know what justice is? And we spend all this time with Alcibiades spinning his wheels to finally say, you know what, Socrates, I don't know what it is. I finally realized I don't know what you expect is the first time reader Socrates, you say, okay, great, this is what justice is. And he says, okay, good, we're moving on. All I wanted you to know was that you don't know what it is. So I do think like this kind of. This can also happen when you read Plato because you have to have an expectation of where he's actually moving the dialogue. And sometimes you work through things that are difficult. I think the feto is difficult at times. And then you're not even rewarded at the end with a very black and white answer. But you can't give up.
- [45:39]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, every once in a while Plato will give you something like an answer, say what justice is at some point. But though it does end up being complicated too. But yeah, at the end of the euthyphro, I don't know what piety is. I know what it isn't. And I have a better idea about the. What you actually have to think about to give an answer to that question. Like what, what issues it's connected to. If I feel like I've learned something and I'm more knowledgeable than before. But yeah, if the, if you think you need the answer to be satisfied, you could give up on the entire enterprise. Right. Like the philosophical life is One in which you have to be comfortable with not knowing while still pursuing knowledge.
- [46:20]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [46:22]
Dr. Christopher Frey
And sometimes you just want the payoff. And the arguments, none of them are working. Or it could, it could lead someone to abandon the entire enterprise, which is what he does not want. Yeah, correct.
- [46:34]
Podcast Host
The other thing you have to be comfortable with is, is knowing that simply because you know something is not something that's actually knowledge. Right. So I've come to understand. I've come to understand what piety is, not that via negativa. I've come to understand what justice is not. Some of the whole dialogues are just focused on this. All I'm trying to do is dissipate whatever the common notion of this is, and that's actually knowledge. That's a true knowledge. Oh, this thing is not the thing that I thought it was. But again, sometimes we're not comfortable with that. Sometimes we don't find that rewarding. But it's actually that knowing what I don't know is really a great first step.
- [47:07]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I mean, Plato holds a general view that the impulse towards any philosophical pursuit is a recognition that you don't. No, Right. It, it starts in wonder, but wonder involves ignorance. Right. Because if you knew, it wouldn't be wondrous and awe inspiring. And you recognize that absence in you and the drive to know is to fill that lack. Right. Like you recognize there's something worth having that's missing in you. And the drive towards knowledge, the drive to become complete again, like to, to fill what is absent in, in the part of you that should be most important to you, the part of the soul that deals with truth and knowledge. Right. Aristotle takes on this view too, that all philosophy begins in wonder. Because it's only when you realize you don't have knowledge that you desire it. You desire things you don't have.
- [47:55]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [47:57]
Dr. Christopher Frey
If you had it, you might want to keep it. But, but to desire something is to lack it. And so if you're engaged in philosophy at all, it's not that you have knowledge, it's that you're seeking it. And so there's a recognition that you're ignorant. But sometimes the tool's argumentation, it doesn't. It could lead you down bad paths. There are con men out there constantly using arguments in ways that are maybe persuasive but have no truth in them. It could be disheartening. And you can get up on it as well.
- [48:25]
Podcast Host
Yeah, no. Very good. Okay, so look kind of looking at the, the structure of the dialogue.
- [48:28]
Dr. Christopher Frey
So he's, he's handled there's one more big argument. Yeah.
- [48:31]
Podcast Host
So he's handled the lyre, the harmony argument. And so now he has to kind of turn, if I understand it correctly, how we're flowing here, he has to turn back to answer this argument about the cloak that the soul can simply just wear out the body. Right. So like a man exists and he might go through 10 cloaks before he dies. Why can't the soul simply go through, you know, 10 bodies and then it dies? I actually really like this argument. I thought it was.
- [48:56]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. You're saying before that you thought this was a nice image.
- [48:59]
Podcast Host
Because I think it took part of his arguments that I thought were sound and his interlocutor is accepting certain premises and then saying, well, does that really reach this conclusion? But what's interesting here is, is that in response to this, we kind of get like an intellectual autobiography from Socrates.
- [49:15]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, right.
- [49:16]
Podcast Host
He, he.
- [49:16]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah.
- [49:18]
Podcast Host
So lead us a bit through this that he starts to kind of explain, you know, that he used to be really interested in. In the natural things. Right. Like a natural scientist.
- [49:27]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Sure. I mean, this is a lot of what philosophical work looked like at the time. These early natural philosophers, they're kind of what we today would be calling scientists. Right. We want to explain what's going on in terms of basic material stuffs, Earth, air, water, fire, or other more mysterious things, and give explanations in terms of hot, cold and wet and dry and interactions between these. And he attempted to do this when he was young, like to try and engage in these. These kinds of explanations. And he was finding them unsatisfying. And then he came across Anaxagoras and Anaxagoras, one of his views is that the entire cosmos was created by a divine mind noose, and that this governs the coming to be of everything. And finally he's just like, all right, this is where it's at. This is actually what I've been looking for. Right. Because these other explanations just in terms of, like, what happens, you know, when a hot body bumps into a cold body. And so, like, they weren't explaining the things he wanted to be explained. The kinds of explanations he wanted, he thought could be explained if you invoke something like a divine mind. Because like, you could say, hey, why are things the way they are? Well, because this divine mind created them to be this way. And if it is a divine mind, it created them that way because it was somehow best for it to do so. Right. Those are the explanations he wanted. Like, you know, why does it rain like this in the winter? And not in the summer, or why did the oak tree grow in this way rather than a different way? He wanted some sort of explanation about why it was good that they did so. Similarly, he says, look, if you said, hey, why did you go to the gym this morning? Or like, explain you're going to the gym this morning, and you just said, well, first this muscle twitch fiber moved and that extended my leg out. And like you gave an explanation of the base physiology about your walking to the gym. That's one explanation of what happened. But he wants an explanation. Like, I wanted to get healthy and I realized the best means to do it was to get over there. Like if you said, if you said, like, what caused him to go to the gym? He wants that kind of causal explanation, the one that brings in like a purpose or an end or why something is good. And then he started reading Anaxagoras and none of those explanations are actually present. Like, he posited a divine mind and didn't employ it in the way that Socrates thought would be obvious and satisfying to do, right? He just talked about, he explained things in the same way a lot of other natural philosophers did, just in terms of ratio of, you know, earth, air, water and fire and, and whether something hot body, how it interacts with cold bodies and things like that. Like that's, that's mostly how these people explain things. And so he's, he's like, look, I'm giving up on all natural philosophy. I'm not good at it. And even if I were good at it, the sort of explanations I produce aren't the ones I'm actually looking for. And so he says, look, I just pulled back and he says a simple and naive answer, right? Why is this thing hot? It participates in the form of the hot, hot mess, right? Stands in a certain relation to this. Why is this tall form of the tall. Like now he says this is naive and it may sound dumb, but he's like, this thing is. This thing is. This thing is beautiful because of beauty. It has beauty in it. And that's the same explanation for this other thing is beautiful. It has beauty in it.
- [52:57]
Podcast Host
So is it, is it safe to say here what he is seeking is because I think I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to post something on the text that's not here. But I know this more in Aristotelian terms. So it seems like what's happening is that we have these philosophers that are very good about the material costs. Why, why am I sitting in this Chair right now. Well, I would answer you by, well, this is how my body's arranged. And these are the sinews of, you know, my body and the bones and the muscles and etc. But that doesn't actually tell you why I'm in this chair while you're out of the chair.
- [53:29]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Like, if you pulled the chair out, why did you fall? Well, I'm primarily earthen, and earthen things move down. No, you want a story about the guy pulling it out.
- [53:36]
Podcast Host
Right? So it seems like. It seems like what's missing here is final causality. It's the purpose. Right. So, no, I'm sitting in the chair because I actually want to have this podcast. Well, why do you want to have the podcast? Well, because I'm trying to teach people about the great books. Right.
- [53:49]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Well, something like final causality, and coming with that is an explanation that invokes an idea of something being good or better. Right?
- [53:55]
Podcast Host
Yeah, because you have to have that. This thing would actually be a good. Right. So there's. There's teleology here. There's telos that things are working towards an end. Okay, so this, that's.
- [54:02]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I think if a mind was directing things, it would be governed by a mind and things would be the way they are because it was good and there was purpose and end in it. And he wasn't finding that anywhere.
- [54:11]
Podcast Host
Okay. No, I appreciate that clarification. And then this is.
- [54:14]
Dr. Christopher Frey
This does lead to another argument for souls being immortal, which is interesting. So he says, look, if we just talk about the forms themselves. His big example is hot and cold. He says, look, can the hot itself become cold? We're like, no. Like, the form of hot is perfectly hot. It can no way change and be cold. Like, what would it even be for the hot to be like? It almost makes no sense. Opposites can't turn into one another. A lot of things, they can be hot at one moment or cold at another moment. Right? Like, you know, you put your cast iron pan on the campfire, it's going to get hot later, it's going to be cold. But he says, look, there are actually things in the world which are kind of like the forms in that you can't actually take away the property and have them still be around. Right? So I can change. I can make. You can make a cast iron pan that's hot, cold, Right. Just by taking out the stove. Can you make though fire cold? Can you take away fire's heat and have it still remain fire? He's like, no, you can't have cold. Fire, like fire is hot in a way that it completely resists any change from having that property. Just like the hot itself can't become cold, fire can't become cold. And then you say, well, look, here's a different explanation. You don't just say something hot becomes hot because it has the form of heat in it, or Sandstone's relation. Form the heat, we can give a kind of causal relation. The, the pan becomes hot because something that's essentially hot or something that has hotness tied so much to it that it could never be cold and remain it comes to be present in the pan, right? The, the heat from the essentially hot fire is transferred into the pan. And he says, all right, this is what he thinks is happening with the soul and life. So you say, so what is it that is added to a body that makes it alive? Well, that's the soul. Everyone agrees that the soul is the principle of life. The soul is what causes a living thing to be alive. And so the soul is going to play the same kind of role that fire does. Fire is hot in a way that you can't take the heat away. And that's why it plays a primary causal role in making other things hot. The soul is going to do the same thing, is it? So the. The soul shift this them. The soul is alive itself in a way that it can't be taken away from. And that's what enables it to play the role of making things that are sometimes alive or sometimes not alive alive. Right? So you got like, you got a pan, could be hot, could be not. You take something that's essentially hot that always has to be hot, it can change that thing and, and make it go from cold to hot. In a similar way, you've got some inanimate body could be alive, not alive. You've got a soul which life is essential to. It can't be taken it away. It comes to be present in the inanimate body and gives it life. But now you've got this odd thing. The soul is always alive, just like fire is always hot. But being always alive is a way more unique property than always hot, like, because fire can cease to be, right? Fire is always hot, but we could put it out, right? Is there any way to get rid of something that's always alive? And that's harder because if something's always alive, that's the kind of property that it's synonymous with its being eternal and immortal. Right. Being deathless and being immortal, he thinks are the same. So, so if you've got something that life can't be taken away from, then you've got something that's immortal and the soul is something that life can't be taken away from. Bodies can be alive or die, but, you know, you could have a living body, you can have a corpse. Maybe that corpse gets soul pushed back into it. Or, you know, like bodies could be alive or not. Souls are always alive and always alive is just another way of saying immortal.
- [58:55]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [58:56]
Dr. Christopher Frey
So just like kind of neat argument, I think.
- [58:57]
Podcast Host
No, it really is a neat argument. Right. Because it presents a more complicated analog. But it's one.
- [59:04]
Dr. Christopher Frey
And I, I brushed over a lot of details. It's the text is this is one of the more complicated arguments he has?
- [59:12]
Podcast Host
Yeah, no, I think it's a. I think it's a wonderful analog. Right. So basically, as the fire cannot actually even receive coldness, neither can the soul actually receive death. It's actually like contrary to its principle. Yeah, I think it's. I think it's a. It's a different.
- [59:27]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Is. Fire can cease to be because there's nothing about having heat, essentially that makes something immortal. But death is a very different property. If you, if you. Sorry, if you always have life, what would it mean to. Yeah, it's. It's not going to be the sort of thing that could ever cease to be. Yeah. So souls are always alive in the fundamental way that something could be alive, bodies are sometimes alive or not. Right. And that's where he ends up, I think the, the totality of all these arguments and also eliminating alternatives about harmony and so on. I think he's thinking together they are reinforcing the picture he put forward before without argument. Right. About the role that the soul plays. And so he thinks. Yeah, at this point, he thinks that when one dies, he's shown, at least to his satisfaction, that the soul will live on.
- [60:32]
Podcast Host
Yeah. I think this might be the most convincing of the arguments, or at least the one that I think is most clever.
- [60:40]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It is. I like it better than the others as well. So not to say that someone couldn't poke holes in it. There's every, every one of these arguments. One could. And even at this point, like, there's. He has to argue more that like, you know, the features of your soul that you develop, well, you live, persist after death. Right. So how you live life is going to determine the outcome of your afterlife. Right. If you were virtuous, it's the soul that's. That's just. It's the soul that's temperate. It's the soul, that's courageous and that will be discerned by divine judges in the afterlife. And here he brings in all sort of mythological elements to which he's less confident about. But he thinks the story, if you adopt it, will make you live better. Right. Like if you think, even if you think you could think that having an immortal soul, you could, you could have an immortal soul without also thinking that the way you live your life has any bearing on what happens to the immortal soul after you die. Right? Like, sure, your soul's gonna live, but who cares whether you live virtuously or viciously? This is on a little shakier ground. And it's just like, it's better if you think that living virtuously is going to lead you to a better outcome.
- [61:54]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. I mean, two thoughts on that. Because it seems like the segue here is that then there's a natural question that arises of, well, wait, where does the soul go? If the soul can't actually receive death, so then it gets separated from the body, where does the soul go? So that seems to be kind of our segue into this myth that he gives this kind of New Earth myth. But I, I to your point, I mean, does that mean, I mean, this is probably the wrong phrase, but I just want to throw it out here. Does that mean the myth is a beautiful lie? It's a noble lie that we tell ourselves. So it's not, it's not the polis telling the citizen here's a myth because it helps us overall. This is something that we tell ourselves.
- [62:34]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Because if it's lie, it's correct. Might be you hope it's true. Like a, it very well could be true. He thinks it's true.
- [62:44]
Podcast Host
But it's true in principle though, right? It's true. Like the details of the myths change.
- [62:49]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, it's true in principle. And everyone will live a better life if they believe it. I don't think that amounts to a lie. It's not like, I mean, a lie. I take it there's some knowledge that, you know, it's false. He's admitting that at some point some things he says are not.
- [63:06]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's not malicious, right? It's not. It's not malicious. But it seems like these two concepts are somewhat tethered to each other. Right?
- [63:14]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Which two concepts? I'm sorry?
- [63:15]
Podcast Host
Well, the noble lie that we write, the beautiful lie that we would tell a third party a certain myth is true to make them live a better life, like he does in the Republic, but also then he Says, well, here are some principles in the afterlife. I'm not really sure about the details, but if we believe these stories and believe the principles, we'll actually live a better life. So one we tell to ourselves, the other one we tell the third parties. But obviously he's aware of where. What's true and what is kind of a fabrication. Not necessarily as a negative, but it's the context, right? He's trying to tell a story.
- [63:50]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure. Like, fabrication. I don't. I don't know if I go that far. Like, it's not. There's some reasons to believe that thing. Maybe not in every detail. Like, oh, here's this river here, and there are five rooms. Right? Like, there's a level of detail where you're just like, look, what argument could I possibly give to have that much detail about what the afterlife is like? He thinks the details give. I'm saying this, I'm not 100% if I'm convinced of this, even though I'm saying I think the details give flavor. The detail that make it more compelling. Some underlying thing that he is more confident in, what he wants, is that the way you live your life is going to matter for the status of your soul after death. And in particular, living a philosophical life will lead to the best outcome after death. That's what he wants. Whether there's one spirit that's with you that judges you and sends you into one of two rooms. And he's got details about, like, oh, well, they have to go down to Tartarus and then they have to come back after a few years and the people they wrong during their lives have to forgive them. And if they don't, they. They got to go down for another session of time and Tartarus and come back. And only after the people they've wronged forgive them that they can go into the next stage. But there's lots of detail here which he admits, like, he's in no position to know those details. There are stories like this that he's adopting and changing. But he does think that if you. I think if you adopt the more mythological, detailed version, it will bring into relief and help you be more committed to something that he is more confident in. Right. The more important thing, that you should be living a philosophical life, focusing on what's true and good and trying to attain knowledge, and that this is going to have a consequence, Right? Like that it's going to affect whether you actually achieve your ends, that you actually form, fully realize the best kind of existence, of being like you, you know, a soul could have. And so I don't know if a little detail helps fill in to make it more compelling, I'd be fine. I don't know if that's a lie.
- [66:11]
Podcast Host
Well, he doesn't present it. He doesn't present it as a lie.
- [66:14]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Right, Yeah, I mean, it was just. And I, and I understand why this is hard because, I mean, it's a very difficult subject, just among interpreters and commentators, the role that myths play in any of these things. It is. I. Sorry, when I'm saying these things, I'm thinking of the 700 professional historians of ancient philosophy who are mad at me.
- [66:33]
Podcast Host
Right now because that's fine.
- [66:35]
Dr. Christopher Frey
They're very detailed views about what he's up to here. But like, in response, like, I, I think what is important is this idea where he's like, look, there are certain things in this story that maybe every detail isn't right. But let me tell you, I'd go with the story, even with that writer, like, even with that caveat, because the stakes are so high and he does think, he knows that to the extent that he can know anything in his embodied state, that the only chance you have to gain knowledge is to have the outcome of the soul being separated from the body, a complete separation in which it's no longer tied to anything bodily. And the only way you can get that is by practicing the separation of the soul from the body by focusing on intellectual immaterial things and avoiding an emphasis on bodily things. That's the only way, you know, you're, you're, you're trying the best you can to live an embodied life that's as close to a disembodied life as can be, right? Where you're just engaging in the non bodily things.
- [67:47]
Podcast Host
No, I agree. I think, because again, if you go and you compare this, this myth of the Earth and its kind of strata and its hierarchy, which reminds me a lot of the ladder of love and allegory of the cave. But if you compare this myth to then the myth of Earth and the Republic, or the myth at the end with Calicles and the Gorgias, you see really clearly, like their geographies, their little detail, they don't line up. But the principles, right, the pedagogical principles of you're going to be judged according to how you lived and that's going to benefit you, right? Because I think you think about the Republic. He's still kind of answering these questions about why justice, why the good life is More profitable than a life of injustice. Right. Do you think maybe this goes into making the 700 academics listening upset? But do you think that when he gives these myths, he's making it easier for us to understand what is in his philosophy? So, like, we can't really understand the arguments and so he gives us a narrative to help us understand? Or do you think that his philosophy is coming to an end, it's gotten to an end where the arguments don't really. They can't hold anymore. And so we have to have a religious myth to try and express what we really can't actually prove. Does that make sense?
- [69:07]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I'm of the opinion that. That I think you can have. I think different responses are better or worse for different myths. Like, I don't think there's an overarching theory. This is what Plato's doing when he presents something mythic. I think there are instances of both ways you've described it that you can find in his corpus. There are some things that are just quite evidently meant for pedagogical reasons, like the. The. I don't know if you'd call it a myth in this case, but allegory at least. Right. So the Cape and things like this, where he's more clear, like, it's clearly a false story. It sounds like a myth, but he's very clear that it's meant to be didactic for pedagogical purposes. You could actually point to, like, what each element in the story represents in his broader philosophy. Here, it's less of that, you know, but it is giving a more detailed picture. And it's also a picture grounded in a lot of religious practice that people already had. Like, not everyone views the world exactly as he described it, but there's plenty around ancient Greek culture talking about Tartars and talking about, you know, land of the blessed, and there's another place where you can go in your torment. Like, he's incorporating a lot of religious commitments in slightly different forms that were already readily, readily accepted by people. And that, in a way, I don't know if reinforces belief is the correct thing, but it's. He thinks it's fine if people believe that, and it's probably actually a good thing to do. So and it may well be true, and it would be great if it were precisely true. Like, he doesn't think. He thinks it may be true. It's so. It's not a line, the sense that it's completely fabricated. And he knows he's just saying something false because it'll be helpful. But it has at that point outstripped what rational argument can provide. Right.
- [71:06]
Podcast Host
It is interesting here too. There's an element here that is actually really similar to the allegory of the cave. Right. Because, I mean, we haven't really talked about the myth itself, but we have this earth and the earth has different strata and it's hollowed out.
- [71:20]
Dr. Christopher Frey
They're like weird caves and crevices at different levels. Connected. Yeah.
- [71:24]
Podcast Host
Right. And so, like, you know, we're. We're in our. He actually talks about that. We're actually in one of these little hollows. Right. Which is very cave like. And, you know, we're looking up at a sky and we. We actually think that's like the highest. But really, you know, for someone else, that's their ocean, that's their baseline. And so he creates this where this is this. This hierarchy. Right. Where the souls could ascend. And so why it reminds me of the cave, reminds me of the ladder of love.
- [71:48]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. You are not the first to notice these connections. There's. There's similar themes of ascendance and people not realizing that there's a better condition to be in.
- [72:01]
Podcast Host
Yeah. I will say, though, it's not. And so maybe, you know, if you have any, any insight maybe to it, to its main purpose or any. Anything that you'd like to highlight, because I will say it. It first falls short of, like, if I had to rank them, like right now I like the myth at the end of the Gorgias probably the best. Then I like the myth of Ur. And then I like this one. I think the other two are more creative. I think they're a little bit more clear in their pedagogy. I think they present better images. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something in this one. But if I look at all three of them together, this one is the one that I struggle with the pull the most out of, if that makes sense.
- [72:40]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah. I like the ones in the Gorgias. Those are. Those are fantastic. Trying to think I may not at the point, have something more than what has been said already to make it ascend. Your end of the year Platonic myth ranking.
- [72:59]
Podcast Host
Right. I did find it interesting that there were.
- [73:03]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It was. There's a way in which, like just aesthetically as a piece of literature, it is incredibly intricate and complicated. The details, like almost to a point where it's hard to depict. There's a lot of geography going on, precisely where which rivers are flowing. I mean, just that way. Aesthetically. Some of the Myths, I think, are better or more compelling. Like, they're easy to.
- [73:27]
Podcast Host
One thing that Plato has in his myths of, you know, judgment and these kind of things that I think is really interesting coming from the Catholic intellectual tradition, is that he typically has some type of purgation. Right. It's not simply that you're. You're judged according to where you are, but there's also this, like, you have to undergo a purging element. So he talks about this down.
- [73:46]
Dr. Christopher Frey
He's got two different kinds of purgatory, which is. There's one where he doesn't go into the details of what to happen, but you're kind of just in a waiting room. You know, it's been, you know, that's for most people, their normal vicious acts. There are some people, and there's some people who are so bad they're done for. But there's like this other. Yeah. Which I was describing briefly, where, like, you go down to Tartarus, but it's not a permanent sentence. You come back, but it's just not a matter of time, like living a sentence. You have to have developed in such a way that the people you harmed will forgive you for what you did to them. And if you don't, then you have another sentence down there that's like a different kind of purgatory than the people who are just waiting for their. Their sins, as it were, to be cleansed. So, yeah, he's got. He's got multiple levels and he does think that some people just get to pass it all. He's hoping he's one of them and just goes straight to hanging out with the forms themselves.
- [74:47]
Podcast Host
You know, one thing we haven't, we haven't mentioned that I think is really interesting, particularly for being a pagan text, is hope. He talks about hope, Right. It's just, it's just a kind of a beautiful picture that like, we can hope. And I think this kind of gives a lot of energy maybe to. To him actually trying to philosophize after that barrier of death, that it's actually somewhat animated by a hope that this, this can be better, there can be a restorative justice, that. That there is going to be a justice about how we live their lives. Like the tyrants of this life are not going to win there.
- [75:20]
Dr. Christopher Frey
There's hope that genuine knowledge can be attained. Right. That it's not a literally impossible end, but just a temporary one explained by our attachment to a body. But there's a solution to it. And what you've seeked your. You Know what you've been seeking your entire life? That end is something that could be satisfied. You can have it. It's very hard to do. And you have to live a certain life, which isn't an easy one, but there is that kind of hope. There's a sense, not hope, that it could happen during our embodied lifetime. Right. But. But that in the next world, as it were, can be attained.
- [76:04]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [76:05]
Dr. Christopher Frey
We should probably mention this. Just one more thing. I mean, he does eventually take the point that the hour comes, right? And he doesn't delay it. He's just like, it's fine. I could spend another half hour, but we'll take it now. His last words are interesting. Did you catch what these were?
- [76:23]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, this is. I mean, I. Yeah, I mean, go ahead. Yeah. Then I'll. I'll share my thoughts.
- [76:28]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Well, he says. He talks to Kryto. He says, crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it and don't forget. And then he dies shortly thereafter. Yeah.
- [76:39]
Podcast Host
There's two. Two things that, I mean, just, you know, as a neophyte, I mean, just kind of offering things. One, it's interesting to me that he says we. Right. I think that's fascinating. I'm not sure I don't have anything loaded behind that, but I think it's interesting that it's plural, like, we owe this. And then two, you know, I, like, obviously, like, a lot of people are like, wait, what is this? He's. He's mentioning a Olympian God. He's mentioning a pagan God at the end. Is. Is he afraid? Is he saying, no, I'm restoring back to the Olympian concept. You know, it's not the God, etc. I like the interpretations, you know, because the God he mentions here is the God of healing. And so I really like the interpretations that what he's doing here is a symbol that death is a healing. This goes into that negative view of the body. The soul is finally being freed from the prison. And the statement that we should give a sacrifice to the God of healing is a final commentary on what he thinks death is.
- [77:36]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Yeah, this is this kind of reading, which is actually the one I favor most. It was most famously put forward by Nietzsche, who thought, right, Asclepius is the God of medicine and healing. What a sufferer does is they make an offering before they go to sleep with the hope of waking up cured. Right. But for Socrates, the malady for which he wants to be cured is embodied life itself, not life itself, because you've Got life eternal, but embodiment, right. And the sort of embodied life that we're currently going through. Right. The moment of death is analogous to the moment one goes to sleep. Right. And Socrates hopes to awaken, as it were, as his true self, as his soul unencumbered in this way. You view death as the cure for embodied life. Now, when Nietzsche put this forward, he thought this was a repugnant view. Like he was just like, no, the embodied life is where all human flourishing is. Right. Like this is, this is a way of a, you know, this is a kind of asceticism and a hate of the bodily life typical of the resentful priestly classes. And we should have, you know, he was not a fan. But, but other people, I mean, there have been attempts to try and give different reasons because a lot of people want to resist for various reasons that Plato held this view about embodied life. Maybe not as negatively as, like, I think you and I agreed, it's not a total attempt to annihilate all things bodily, but even the more limited attitude that that in some sense there is no completely flourishing human life within this world, that it could only come after death. A lot of people would prefer that that not be the view held by Plato or Socrates. And so they'll give all sorts of wild readings about what's going on. But this one, it's easily reconcilable with most of what we've been talking about. Right. Like, I mean, even when he over here, around 115A, when he talks about hemlock, he for the first time calls it pharmacon, which is in its primary meaning something that, that removes pollution. That's, that's how he's viewing the hemlock itself. Like, because his soul has been, in a way polluted by material changing things. Yeah. Like some people are like, oh, he's, he's cured his friends from mythology and now they like arguments again. Or, you know, he's talking about Plato being cured, Right. Either from the sickness that he had that prevented him from going there or from his, you know, before he met Socrates, not devoting his life in the right way until he did that. The way in which they try. Responsible.
- [80:30]
Podcast Host
Do they try and. Yeah, something that seems like a stretch to me. But are they trying to predicate that on the we? Because the we I don't have a great answer for a lot of times.
- [80:38]
Dr. Christopher Frey
It'S more on the owe, where they think like it's for something that's already happened. If you owe talk to someone and that typically the practice, it's hard because the actual practice, some people thought you did it before you went to sleep, hoping you'd wake up. Some people think you make the sacrifice after you've been cured to say thank you. If you have that second view, then you're like, well, he can't be talking about something that's about to happen to him. It has to be something. So, I don't know, I like the Nietzschean one. Not because I'm generally inclined to think Nietzsche is a good interpreter of previous historical figures, but. And not because I'm with Nietzsche in entirely opposing the picture Socrates is putting forward, But I think in some way it's compelling in the context of other things he said. And there is a certain way in which I find it kind of beautiful that, that if what. If what Socrates said is correct, he's finally going to get what he sought his entire life, something genuinely good. Right. Knowledge and truth. And he has been waiting it, you know, he's. He's not sad, he's not distraught. How could anyone, he thinks, not be in some sense looking forward to this? And so, yeah, I hope there's something reading it where, like, you know, I'm. I kind of Socrates fan. It's hard to be a philosopher, not like him. To some extent, I'd like to think that as, at least as the story goes, that he died and, and his offering was accepted and he's healed and he was entirely freed from his body. And I don't want him being reincarnated as a bee or being a ghost haunting the cemetery or going through purgatorial fire in Tartarus. I hope he's there with the form of the good, finally getting a full, full knowledge of what he's always been after.
- [82:41]
Podcast Host
Yeah, no, it is a beautiful story and I think it's a beautiful story of hope. I think it's one too, that, you know, if you can find one of these in a pagan context, then how much greater should our hope be that have faith in Jesus Christ and divine revelation? And I think sometimes, you know, when I read these pagan texts, I feel like they just push me upward. Like, how much greater? Like, how much more I should actually root myself in these types of hope. If someone like Socrates, who's trying to see, you know, through this kind of dim veil of death about trying to philosophize about what it's life, if he can enter it with this much, you know, fortitude, this much hope, this much beauty, I think it's a wonderful lesson for Our life.
- [83:21]
Dr. Christopher Frey
You read Augustine, you read Boethius, you read any of these people. It's. It. It's not a difficult transition from the form of the good to God, whose goodness himself. And some of the arguments they give for God are arguments Plato basically gives for the existence of the form of the good. Right, right. And if you say, look, if that's the end goal, that. That's. I want. I want the very essence of goodness to be something present in my soul through what was really my soul like. My soul's primarily intellectual. If I can actually come to know goodness itself. It's not altogether dissimilar from what we were saying before about the beatific vision where if God is goodness himself, and I mean, there's a difference about grace and gifts and so on, that's present in the Catholic tradition. That isn't. Isn't here. But there are enough similarities where. And the similarities aren't accidental like that. There are elements from Plato and Aristotle being used and elevated, as it were.
- [84:30]
Podcast Host
I agree. Well, Dr. Frey, this has been wonderful. I appreciate you kind of guiding us through the Phaedo, this kind of beautiful text. We appreciate all of your insights. Thank you for joining us.
- [84:41]
Dr. Christopher Frey
I was a joy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
- [84:44]
Podcast Host
Where can people find out more about you and your work?
- [84:47]
Dr. Christopher Frey
Oh, you could probably just go to ChristopherFray.org I couldn't buy the dot com. Someone's sitting on it. So I'm an organization and yeah, it's got a cv or you could just, you know, type in University of Tulsa, Department of Philosophy. And there's links to contact stuff and all of that.
- [85:07]
Podcast Host
Oh, very good. All right, everyone go check that out. In the next couple weeks, we're going to be taking up the Mino, and then we're going to take up the Gorgias. So you can check us out on X or our patreon account or thegreatbookspodcast.com.
- [85:21]
Dr. Christopher Frey
There'S actually the argument that he gives in the Mino. I had to write it up earlier today.
- [85:25]
Podcast Host
There you go. If you're watching the YouTube video, you have it watching the YouTube video, then you've got a snapshot, you've got an early foresight into it. So check us out on those resources to see our reading schedule. And we really appreciate you guys being here today. And we will see you next week. Thank you.