I cannot see how the dream episode could be reduced to Plato’s attributing to Socrates in the Phaedo such thoughts and sentiments as he considered appropriate for Socrates to have face to face with his imminent death. In a number of Plato’s dialogues Socrates is disparaging of art and poetry as it was normally understood, and even of the art of writing as such,(4) and this disparagement is closely linked to the Theory of Forms.(5) Had Plato introduced the Theory of Forms to the reader in the Phaedo as a new theory that would have transformed the last day of Socrates into an occasion filled with the deepest happiness, had it been in Socrates’ possession on that day, why then does he open the dialogue by casting doubts on Socrates’ understanding of art and philosophy? And why was the story of the dream introduced as an answer to Evenus? Evenus was a poet and philosopher from Paros who was at the time teaching in Athens. Socrates picked on him in his Defence; Evenus paraded himself as an ‘expert on human and political excellence’, offering his teaching for a moderate price of five minae (Pl. Ap. 20b-c). If the Phaedo were fictional, why did Plato link it to the Apology in this manner? This question is difficult to answer. But if the purpose of the dialogue is to present Socrates on his last day as authentically as possible, then the answer is at hand. Socrates in his Defence referred to Evenus with biting irony, and Evenus retaliated by asking for the reason of Socrates’ writing of poetry in prison, no doubt well aware that with this question he put his finger on Socrates’ uncertainty and weakness; had Socrates at the last moment revised his views on art and philosophy?
Socrates replied by challenging Evenus: ‘‘Cebes, tell him to have strength (errôsthai), and if he is wise (an sôphronęi), to follow me as quickly as he can. I’m off today, it seems, by Athenians’ orders.’ (61b7-c1). This extraordinary message is the trigger to the whole subsequent discussion about the meaning of philosophy and its role in human life, and about the soul’s immortality. Simmias, Cebes’ friend and compatriot from Thebes, exclaimed: ‘What a thing you’re urging Evenus to do, Socrates!’ Socrates reposted: ‘Isn’t Evenus a philosopher?’ All that follows can be seen as Socrates’ explanation of his message to Evenus: a true philosopher endeavours to see true being, and he can fully achieve this aim only in the disembodied existence of his soul after his death.
We may presume that Socrates’ reply to Evenus was soon widely known. In it Socrates characterizes his whole life in a nutshell; through all his life he has been true to the command ‘practise mousikęn’ interpreted as a command to practise philosophy; on his last day he remained true to this command to the very end. Socrates’ doubts concerning his life-long vocation expressed in his attempts to write poetry during his imprisonment were just a momentary lapse. On his last day he compares himself to swans ‘that sing all their life long, but most fully and beautifully (pleista kai kallista) when they perceive that they must die’ (84e5-85a1). The dream ordered Socrates to produce and practise mousikę, and in his practising philosophy on his last day in prison he did so. This is what forms the basis of Plato’s endeavour to rehabilitate and resuscitate Socrates as a major moral and political force in all his writings devoted to Socrates after Socrates’ death.
In the Phaedo Plato enumerates a number of men who were present with Socrates in prison on his last day: Apollodorus, Critobulus, Crito, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes, Ctesippus, Menexenus, ‘and some others’ from Athens, Phaedo from Elis, Simmias, Cebes, and Phaedondes from Thebes, Euclid and Terpsion from Megara (59b-c). Had Socrates’ actual behaviour been in discord with his vow made in his Defence, the vow that he would practise philosophy as long as he breathed, it would have been widely known. If Socrates spoke and behaved differently from the picture Plato presented of him in the Phaedo, if he did not speak and act in accordance with his previous life, how could Plato have chosen him to play in his dialogues the role of a protagonist of a perfect unity between one’s words and one’s actions? This question becomes especially poignant when we learn from Plato’s Seventh Letter that the imperative of establishing harmony between philosophy and the philosopher’s actions was a guiding principle that Plato himself endeavoured to live up to (328c-e).
I cannot but agree with Burnet when he notes that the Phaedo professes to be nothing less than a faithful picture of Socrates: ‘We are certainly led to believe that it gives us a truthful record of the subjects on which Socrates discoursed on the last day of his life, and of his manner of treating them. No reader who made his first acquaintance with Socrates here could possibly suppose anything else.’(6) He adds that he cannot bring himself to believe that Plato falsified the story of Socrates’ last hours on earth by using him as a mere mouthpiece for novel doctrines of his own.(7) I have a special reason for agreeing with Burnet concerning this point. I studied Plato for some twenty years in the former Czechoslovakia in almost complete isolation from modern interpretations of Plato, and in my reading of the dialogue during that whole period it never occurred to me to doubt the essential veracity of Plato’s depiction of Socrates’ last day.
Burnet argues that the narrative is put into the mouth of Phaedo of Elis, who was certainly still living when the Phaedo was written; he was a mere lad when Socrates died in 399 (Phaed. 89b3), yet he lived to found the philosophic school of Elis. He says that a similar consideration applies to Socrates’ chief interlocutors in Phaedo’s narrative, the two youngsters (tôn neaniskôn, 89a3) Simmias and Cebes, who too were certainly alive when the dialogue was published, and so were probably others of the company of friends present at Socrates’ deathbed. Burnet therefore refuses to believe that under these circumstances Plato could have conceived of the Phaedo simply as an ‘imaginary conversation’, but says that ‘if we choose to suppose that he [Plato] introduced into the Phaedo sayings and doings of Socrates which really belonged to other occasions, there is nothing to be said against that; for such concentration of characteristic traits in a single scene is quite legitimate in dramatic composition.’(8)
Let me add that Phaedo undoubtedly narrated the story of Socrates’ last hours many times, and so did all the other friends who were with Socrates on his last day. And although Plato was not present in prison on Socrates’ last day, for he says so in the dialogue (59b10), we know that after Socrates’ death he went with other Socratics to Megara, to the home of Euclides (Diog. Laert. ii. 106, iii. 6). As Burnet notes, this information rests on the authority of Hermodorus, a disciple of Plato who wrote a book about him.(9) What would the friends have discussed there but what happened during Socrates’ last hours, glad that they had an avid listener in Plato, who missed being with them and with Socrates on that most memorable occasion? A philosophically highly complicated and demanding discourse would be remembered differently by each, as each would tend to reproduce it according to his own philosophic bias. Plato then had to use his philosophic insight into Socrates’ thought while drawing on and making sense of the narratives of Socrates’ friends and disciples who were there.
Unfortunately, Burnet compromised his view on the Phaedo by claiming that the doctrine of Forms on which Socrates in the dialogue bases his proofs of the immortality of the soul was not originated by Plato, or even by Socrates, but was essentially Pythagorean.(10) This was refuted by W. D. Ross who showed that Aristotle viewed Plato as the author of the Theory of Forms, that is Ideas as Ross prefers to call Plato's essences. Aristotle’s account of the original conception of the Theory of Forms is of paramount importance concerning the question of the authenticity of Plato’s picture of Socrates in the Phaedo, so let us consider the relevant passages with Ross’ help.
In Metaphysics A. 987a29-b9 Aristotle says:
‘After the systems we have named came the philosophy of Plato, which in most respects followed these thinkers [i.e. the Pythagoreans], but had peculiarities that distinguished it from the philosophy of the Italians. For, having in his youth first become familiar with Cratylus and with the Heraclitean doctrines (that all sensible things are ever in a state of flux and there is no knowledge about them), these views he held even in later years. Socrates, however, was busying himself with ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions; Plato accepted his teachings, but held that the problem applied not to sensible things but to entities of another kind - for this reason, that the common definition could not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing. Things of this other sort, then, he called Ideas, and sensible things, he said, were all named after these, and in virtue of a relation to these.’
This account of Plato’s conception of the Theory of Forms in Metaphysics A on its own could be reconciled with Burnet’s claim that the theory was first formulated by the Pythagoreans and as such adopted by the historical Socrates, as Burnet believed. What is nevertheless decisive concerning Plato’s authorship of the theory is Aristotle’s account of the matter in Metaphysics M.
In Metaphysics M. 1078b9-32 Aristotle says:
‘Now, regarding the Ideas, we must first examine the ideal theory itself, not connecting it in any way with the nature of numbers, but treating it in the form in which it was originally understood by those who first maintained the existence of the Ideas. The supporters of the ideal theory were led to it because on the question about the truth of things they accepted the Heraclitean sayings which describe all sensible things as ever passing away, so that if knowledge or thought is to have an object, there must be some other and permanent entities, apart from those which are sensible; for there could be no knowledge of things which were in a state of flux. But when Socrates was occupying himself with the excellences of character, and in connection with them became the first to raise the problem of universal definition ... Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions exist apart: they, however, gave them separate existence, and this was the kind of thing they called Ideas.’(11)
Ross notes that in the M passage Plato is not named, but that the reference in both passages to the influence of Heracliteanism, as well as the identical way in which Socrates is introduced in both passages as the mediating influence, and the identity, but for the change of number, of the final statement in both these passages, show that ‘those who first maintained the existence of the Ideas’ in M means just Plato. Ross points out that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics confirms that Aristotle viewed Plato as the author of the Theory of Forms, for he introduced his criticism of Plato’s Good with a remark that ‘such an inquiry is made an uphill one by the fact that the Forms have been introduced by friends of our own’ (1096a12).(12) For Aristotle could hardly have counted among ‘friends of his own’ Socrates, who died long before he himself was born.
Ross is right when he says that Aristotle’s authority is decisive concerning ‘the question whether it was Socrates or Plato who first formulated the ideal theory’. And he is equally right when he adds that ‘this is compatible with accepting Socrates’ account in the Phaedo (96a-100a) of his mental history as substantially true. Aristotle does not tell us that Socrates was a mere moralist who had never had any interest in physical or metaphysical questions. What he says is that when [Ross’ italics] Socrates was interesting himself in ethical questions and not in nature as a whole, Plato took him as his master.’(13) This is a brilliant insight, but Ross’ emphasis on when has its relevance not only concerning Socrates, but as well concerning Plato as far as his conception of the Theory of Forms is concerned: Aristotle speaks of the impact of the philosophic activities of the living Socrates on the young Plato, not of the impact of a memory of Socrates on Plato’s mind some fifteen years after the death of Socrates as is implied by the modern developmental theories of Plato.
Chapter 1 part three...
Chapter 1... part 2... part 3... part 4... part 5... notes
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