PhaedoPlato

The Phaedo is the dialogue of Socrates' last day. He drinks the hemlock at its end. But the conversation that fills the hours between sentencing and death is not about mortality; it is about whether the soul survives the body, and if so, why.

Socrates offers a series of arguments. The argument from opposites: life comes from death as waking comes from sleeping, so the souls of the dead must exist somewhere to return from. The argument from recollection: we recognize equality, beauty, and goodness in particular things, but since no particular is perfectly equal or beautiful, our knowledge of the standard must come from a prior acquaintance with the Forms. The soul existed before birth; it can exist after death.

The affinity argument follows. The soul resembles the invisible, unchanging, intelligible Forms more than it resembles the visible, changing body. What is composite can be dissolved; what is simple cannot. But Simmias and Cebes press objections. Simmias suggests the soul might be a harmony of bodily elements, which perishes when the instrument is destroyed. Cebes grants survival but wonders whether the soul might eventually wear out after many incarnations.

Socrates' final argument introduces the theory of Forms as causes. The soul's essential nature is to bring life to whatever body it occupies. Since life is its essence, it cannot admit its opposite, death. The soul is therefore deathless.

The philosophical arguments have been debated for twenty-four centuries. The dramatic frame has not. Socrates' calm before death remains the image of philosophy as a way of life, not merely a set of propositions.