Chapter 19 Chapter XVI Plato's Theory of Immortality

The dialogue named after "Phaedo" is very interesting in several respects.It deals roughly with the last moments of Socrates' life: his conversations before he drank the poison, and his conversations after he drank the poison until he lost consciousness.This piece shows the ideal character in Plato's mind who has the highest level of wisdom and kindness but is not afraid of death at all.The Socrates facing death described by Plato is important in both ancient and modern ethics. The Phaedo is to the pagan or free-thinking philosopher what the Gospel account of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ is to the Christian.But the equanimity of Socrates in his last moments is combined with his belief in the immortality of the soul; and the importance of the Phaedo is that it not only contains the death of a martyr but also presents many doctrines. , These doctrines later became the doctrines of Christianity.The theology of St. Paul and the Fathers derives for the most part from it, directly or indirectly; and their theology would be almost incomprehensible if Plato were neglected.

An earlier dialogue, the Critus, tells how some of Socrates' friends and disciples arranged a plan to enable him to escape to Thessaly.Had he escaped, perhaps the Athenian authorities would have been pleased; and the proposed plan may be regarded as having a good chance of success.Socrates, however, refused to accept the plan at all.He insisted that he had been sentenced according to the legal process and that it was wrong to do anything illegal to avoid punishment.He was the first to proclaim the principle we call the Mount of Christ: "We should repay no one with grudges, whatever grudges we have received from him".He then imagined himself having a dialogue with the Athenian law, in which the Athenian law stated that he should have more respect for the Athenian law than a son for his father, or a slave for his master, and that every Athenian citizen if If you don't like the country of Athens, you can move out of the country freely.The law of Athens concluded its long speech with the following words:

So, Socrates, listen to us who raised you.Don't think of your own life and children first, and then think of justice; you should think of justice first, so that you can prove your integrity before the king under the nine springs.For if you do what Crito advises you, neither you nor your kindred will be happier, nor holy, or upright in this life, nor in another.Now if you can go away innocent, then you are a sufferer and not a perpetrator; you are not a victim under the law but a victim under everyone.But if you want to retaliate with grievances, revenge with hatred, break the contract and agreement you have made with us, and hurt the person you should least hurt, that is to say, hurt yourself, your friends and you country; then we shall hate you as long as you live; and our brethren, even the law of the world, shall treat you as an enemy; for they shall know that you have done all in your power to come Destroy us.Socrates said that this sound "I seem to hear it humming in my ears, like the flute in the ears of a mystic."He therefore decided that it was his duty to stay and accept the death penalty.

In the Phaedo the last hour comes when his chains are removed; he is allowed to talk freely with his friends.He sent his weeping wife away so that her sorrow might not disturb their discussion.Socrates begins by saying that although any philosophic person is not afraid of death, but welcomes it on the contrary; yet he does not want to take his own life because that is considered illegal.His friend asked him why suicide was considered illegal; his answer was consistent with Orphism, and that was almost exactly what a Christian would say. "There is a secret doctrine that man is a prisoner and has no right to open the door and escape; this is a great secret which I do not know much about."He likened the relationship between man and God to that of cattle and sheep to their masters, and he said that if your cattle acted freely and took its own life, you would be angry; Do not end your own life, but wait for God to call him, just as God is calling me now."He was not troubled by death because he believed that "first I go to other wise and good gods, (I am as sure of this as I am of any such thing), and secondly (Though I'm not so sure of that) I'm going to people who are dead, and they're far better than those I left behind. I'm hoping that there are others Things await the dead, and those things are much better for the good than for the wicked."

Socrates said that death is the separation of the soul from the body.Here we encounter Plato's dualism: namely, reality and appearance, ideas and sense-objects, intellect and sense perception, soul and body.These opposites are all related: in each pair the former is superior to the latter, both in reality and in beauty.Ascetic morality is the natural outcome of this dualism.Christianity adopted this doctrine in part, but never in its entirety.Because there are two obstacles: the first is that, if Plato is right, creating the physical world must be a sinful thing, and therefore the Creator cannot be good.The second is that orthodox Christianity has never brought itself to condemn marriage, even though it considers celibacy to be more noble.The Manicheans were far more consistent on both counts.

The distinction between mind and matter—which has become common knowledge in philosophy, science, and ordinary human thought—has a religious origin, and begins with the distinction between soul and body.We have already said that the Orphists claimed to be the children of the earth and the stars, from the earth they got their bodies and from the sky they got their souls.It is this theory that Plato seeks to express in the language of philosophy. Socrates gave full play to the meaning of asceticism in his theory at the beginning of "Phaedo", but his asceticism is a restrained and gentlemanly asceticism.He does not say that the philosopher should completely abstain from everyday pleasures, only that the philosopher should not be its slave.A philosopher should not bother about diet, but of course he should eat the necessary amount; Socrates does not advocate fasting.And the "Phaedo" also tells us that although Socrates was not a drunkard, he drank more than anyone else on some occasions and never got drunk.It is not drinking but alcoholism that he condemns.In the same way the philosopher should not be preoccupied with the pleasures of love, or with expensive clothes or shoes, or with other personal adornments.He must be wholeheartedly concerned with the soul and not with the body: "He will turn as far as possible from the body to the soul."

It is obvious that this doctrine becomes ascetic when it is popularized; but its intentions are not, properly speaking, ascetic.The philosopher does not try to deny sensual pleasures, but to think of other things.I have known many philosophers who forgot to eat, and ended up refusing to let go of their books even while they were eating.These people are doing what Plato said philosophers should do: they are not making a moral effort to abstain from eating and drinking, but are simply more interested in other things.Obviously, philosophers should also marry and have children in the same unobtrusive manner, but this has become more difficult since women's emancipation.Not surprisingly, Zantip was a shrew.

Socrates went on to say that philosophers wanted to sever the connection between the soul and the body, while others thought that if a person "has no sense of pleasure and cannot enjoy the pleasures of the body," life is not worth living.Plato's statement seems to be—perhaps unintentionally—supporting the view of a certain class of moralists that bodily pleasures are the only ones that count.Such moralists hold that anyone who does not pursue sensual pleasures must avoid pleasures altogether and live a virtuous life.It was a mistake, and it did untold harm.So long as this division of mind and body is acceptable, the worst pleasures, as well as the best, are mental—such as envy, and all forms of cruelty and love of power.Far beyond physical pain, Milton's Satan dedicates himself to a destructive work and derives from it a purely spiritual pleasure.There have been many eminent priests who had renounced all sensual pleasures, but who, by failing to guard well against others, were dominated by love of power; for religion.Hitler is of this type in our day; sensual pleasures of all kinds are in no way important to him.Liberation from the tyranny of the flesh makes man great, but also great in vice as well as in virtue.However, these are digressions, let us return to Socrates.

We come now to the intellectual side of the religion which Plato ascribes (whether rightly or wrongly) to Socrates.The body is said to be an obstacle to knowledge, and hearing and seeing are false witnesses: true existence, if it can be revealed to the soul, can only be revealed to the mind and not to the senses.Let us first consider the implications of this doctrine.It embraces knowledge that is utterly void of experience, including all history and geography.We do not know of a place like Athens or of a man like Socrates whose death and his generous death belonged to the phenomenal world.Of all this we can know anything but by hearing and seeing, and true philosophers do not pay attention to hearing and seeing.So what was left of him?First, there is logic and mathematics; but logic and mathematics are only hypotheticals, and they cannot prove any absolutely meaningful claims about the real world.The next step—and this step is the decisive one—will depend on the idea of ​​the good.Once this idea has been attained, the philosopher is said to know that the good is reality, and thus be able to deduce that the world of ideas is the world of reality.Later philosophers have put forward various arguments to prove the identity of truth and goodness, but Plato seems to assume this is self-evident.If we want to understand Plato, we must assume that this hypothesis no longer needs to be verified.

Socrates said that when the mind sinks in itself and is not disturbed by sensuality, pain and pleasure, when it rejects the body and yearns for the real; then the thinking is the best; despised the flesh". From this point, Socrates spoke of ideas, or forms, or essences. Absolute justice, absolute beauty, and absolute goodness all exist, but they are invisible to the eye." And I say not only these, but absolute greatness, health, power, and the essence or true nature of all things". All this can be seen only by the eyes of the intellect. Therefore, when we are confined to the physical When the soul is infected with the sins of the flesh, our desire for truth will not be satisfied.

This view rejects scientific observation and experimentation as a method of acquiring knowledge.The experimentalist's mind is not "inside itself," and does not want to avoid sensuality.The method proposed by Plato made it possible to pursue only two spiritual activities, namely mathematics and mystical insights.This explains why the two are so closely united in Plato and in the Pythagoreans. For the empiricists, the body is what brings us into contact with the external real world; but for Plato it is doubly evil: it is a distorting medium, making us seem Seeing is blurred like through a mirror; at the same time it is the source of human desire, which prevents us from pursuing knowledge and seeing truth.The following quotes illustrate this point: The mere fact that the flesh needs food makes it a source of endless troubles; and it is prone to disease, which hinders our pursuit of existence.It fills us with love, sensuality, fears, fantasies of every kind, and endless follies; in fact, as they say, it robs us of all powers of thought.Where do wars, slaughters, and factions come from?Didn't it come from the flesh and its desires?Wars are caused by the love of money, and money is necessary for the sake and enjoyment of the flesh; by virtue of these hindrances we cannot have time for philosophy; and last and worst, if we have When there is no time for us to engage in some kind of speculation, the flesh is always interrupting us, causing confusion and confusion to our inquiries, and bewildering us so that we cannot see the truth.Experience has shown us that if we are to have true knowledge of anything we must be free from the body—the soul must be made to see things in themselves: then we can have the wisdom we desire, and say we are Lovers of wisdom; but not in life but after death: for the soul cannot have pure knowledge while it is with the body; knowledge, if at all acquired, must be acquired after death .Thus freed from the follies of the flesh, we shall be pure and commune with all that is pure, and we ourselves shall know that there is light everywhere, and that this light is nothing but the light of truth.For the impure is not allowed to approach the pure. ... And isn't purification nothing but the separation of soul from body? ... This separation and release of the soul from the body is called death. ...and the true philosopher, and only the true philosopher, is always in search of the liberation of the soul. But there is one real money that should be exchanged for everything, and that is wisdom. The founder of the mystical religion once mentioned an image, saying that those who have not been sanctified or entered the lower realm will lie in a mud pit, and those who have entered the Tao and have been purified enter the lower realm. From now on, you will live with the gods; this statement seems to have practical significance, and it is not just empty talk.Because, as they say in mysticism, many people are Dionysian staffers, but few are mystics, and these words refer to real philosophers according to my interpretation. All these words are mystical and are of mystical origin. "Purity" is an Orphic concept, originally having a ritual meaning; but for Plato it signifies freedom from slavery to the body and its needs.Interestingly, he says that wars are caused by the love of money, which is needed only for the service of the flesh.The first half of this opinion is the same as that advocated by Marx, while the second half belongs to another completely different view.Plato believed that if a man's needs were minimized, he could live without money; this is undoubtedly true.But he also believed that a philosopher should be exempt from all manual labor; the philosopher must therefore live off the wealth created by others.There are very few philosophers in a very poor country.What made philosophy possible for the Athenians was the Athenian imperialism of Pericles' time.Roughly speaking, spiritual goods are just as expensive as most material goods, and just as inseparable from economic conditions.Science requires libraries, laboratories, telescopes, microscopes, etc., and the scientist must be sustained by the labor of others.But for mysticism all this is folly.An Indian sage or a Tibetan sage needs no equipment, wears only a loincloth, eats nothing but rice, and lives on very meager alms, because he is considered wise.This is the logical development of Plato's views. To return to the Phaedo: Thebes doubts the permanence of the soul after death, and asks Socrates to give proof.So Socrates argues, but we must say that his argument is very poor. The first argument is that all things have their opposites, and all things are produced by their opposites—an expression that brings us to Anaximander's view of cosmic justice.Since life and death are opposites, each of life and death must produce the other.From this it follows that the souls of the dead exist somewhere, and return to earth in due order.St. Paul's statement: "The seed cannot be reborn unless it dies" seems to belong to such a theory. The second argument is that knowledge is memory, so the soul must have existed before life.The main fact supporting the theory that knowledge is recollection is that we have such notions as "perfect equality" that cannot be derived from experience.We have experience of approximate equality, but absolute equality can never be found in sensible objects; yet we know what we mean by "absolute equality."Since this is not something we learn from experience, it must be that we have brought this knowledge with us from our previous existence.Similar arguments could be applied to everything else, he said.In this way, the existence of the essence and our ability to understand it proves the pre-existence of the knowing soul.The saying that all knowledge is memory has been developed in detail in the "Meno" (below 82).In that article, Socrates said: "There is no teaching, there is only memory." He claimed to be able to prove his point, so he asked Meno to call in a little slave, and Socrates would ask his geometry problem.The little slave's answer was taken by them to show that he did know geometry, though he had never been aware of it. Both the Meno and the Phaedo reach the same conclusion: knowledge is brought by the soul from its premortal existence. On this point we may note, first of all, that this argument is entirely inapplicable to empirical knowledge.The little slave cannot be led to "remember" when the pyramids were built, or whether the Trojan War actually happened, unless he happened to be there.Only that kind of knowledge called "innate"—especially logic and mathematics—could be supposed to be independent of experience and possessed by everyone.And in fact (mysterious intuition aside), this is the only kind of knowledge that Plato admits is really knowledge.Let's see how we can treat this kind of argument mathematically. For example, the concept of equality.We must admit that we do not experience exact equality among sensible objects; we only see approximate equality.How, then, do we arrive at the idea of ​​absolute equality?Or, maybe we don't have such a concept? Let's take a concrete example.The definition of a meter is the length of a stick in Paris at a certain temperature.If we refer to another stick and say that its length is exactly one meter; what should this mean?I don't think our words mean anything.We can say that the most precise measuring process known to science cannot tell whether our sticks are longer or shorter than the Parisian standard.If we are bold enough, we can add a prophecy that no future improvement in measurement technology will be able to change this result.It remains only an empirical statement in the sense that it can be disproved at any time by empirical evidence.I don't think we really have the idea of ​​absolute equality that Plato imagined us to have. Even if we have the idea, it is evident that children do not have it until they reach a certain age, and the idea is evidently induced, though not directly, by experience. .Besides, unless our premortal existence was not a sensual-perceptual one, it would be as incapable of ideas as our temporal life; Why doesn't temporal existence make the same assumption?On all these grounds, therefore, the argument fails. Recalling that it was supposed to be established, Sibbes said: "Half of the proofs required have been proved; namely, that our souls existed before we were alive; but the other half, that the souls The same existence after death as in life has not been proved."So Socrates set out to solve the problem himself.He said that, as stated above, all things are produced by their opposites, so that death must produce life, just as life and death are produced.But he adds another argument, which has a longer history in philosophy: only the complex can be broken down, and the soul, like the idea, is one and not composed of many parts.It should be considered that what is singular cannot have a beginning, or end, or change.Essence is unchanging: absolute beauty, for example, is always the same, while beautiful things are constantly changing.So whatever is seen by us is temporary, but what is not seen by us is eternal.The body is visible, but the soul is invisible; therefore the soul should be classed as being eternal. Since the soul is eternal, it is good at observing the eternal things, that is, the essence; but when it observes the world of all changes in the sense-perception, it will be confused. When the soul uses the body as an instrument of perception, that is, when it uses sight or hearing or other senses (for to perceive through the body means to perceive through the senses), . . . Dragged into the realm of change, the soul is lost and confused; as soon as it comes into contact with change, the world wraps itself around it, and it becomes like a drunkard. . . . but when it returns to itself to think, then it enters into another world, the realm of purity, eternity, immortality, and immutability, which are like souls, and as long as they are So long as it is alone and free, it is always with them; then it is no longer caught in wrong paths, it communicates with the unchanging and becomes unchanging itself.This state of the soul is called wisdom. The soul of a true philosopher has been liberated from the bondage of carnal desires in life, and after death, he will go to the invisible world to enjoy happiness with the gods.But the impure soul, in love with the body, becomes a wandering spirit in a barren mound, or enters the body of an animal, according to its nature, or a donkey, or a wolf, or an eagle.A man who has been virtuous but not a philosopher will, after death, become a bee, or wasp, or ant, or some other gregarious social animal. Only true philosophers ascend to heaven after death. "No one who has never studied philosophy, and who has not died completely innocent, can be with the gods; only the lover of knowledge can".This is why the truly philosophic people renounce carnal desires: not because they are afraid of poverty or disgrace, but because they "realize that the soul is only attached to the body--before philosophy came to take it, it Only through the bars of the prison, not being able to see real being in and through itself, . .Philosophers are temperate, because "every pleasure and pain is a nail to which the soul is fastened to the body, until at last the soul becomes like the body, and believes true what the body affirms to be true." ". Speaking of this, Simmias put forward Pythagoras' opinion that the soul is a piece of music, and asked: If the lyre is broken, can the music continue to exist?Socrates replied that the soul is not a piece of music, because a piece of music is complex, but the soul is single.Moreover, he says that this view of the soul as a piece of music is inconsistent with the pre-existence of the soul, which has been proved by reminiscence; for music did not exist before the lyre. Socrates goes on to relate the history of his own philosophy, which, although very interesting, has little to do with the main argument.He developed the theory of ideas further to arrive at this conclusion: "ideas exist, and other things share ideas and derive their names from ideas".Finally, he also described the fate of the soul after death: the good ones go to heaven, the evil ones go to hell, and the ones in between go to purgatory. The dialogue also describes his deathbed and his farewell.His last words were: "Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster; will you remember to pay this debt?" When people recover from their illnesses, they offer a rooster to Asclepius; But Socrates recovered from a lifetime of episodic cold and fever. Phaedo concluded, "Of all men of his day, he was the wisest, most upright, and most virtuous." Plato's Socrates became the model of philosophers for generations to come.What should we think of him ethically? (I'm only talking about the person Socrates portrayed by Plato.) His merits are remarkable.He was indifferent to worldly success and failure, and so fearless was he that to the last he remained serene, refined, and humorous, and more than anything else, what he believed to be true. care.However, he also has some very serious flaws.His arguments are insincere and sophistry; in his hidden thoughts he is using his reason to prove the conclusions he likes, not in a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.He also has something smug and glib about him, reminiscent of a preacher of the bad type.His bravery would have been all the more remarkable had he died without believing that he was to enjoy eternal bliss among the gods.Unlike some of his predecessors, Socrates was unscientific in thinking, but he was bent on proving that the universe fit his ethical standards.This is a betrayal of truth, and the worst of philosophical crimes.As a person, we can believe that he is qualified to communicate with saints; but as a philosopher, he needs to live in the purgatory of science for a long time.