letter now at once many times and burn it.44
So it seems that no forthright and literal expression of Plato’s true
doctrine is to be found in the corpus of his writings that has been
handed down to us. Instead, we are left to search the dialogues for
traces of it. This is why the speaker is always Socrates or some other straw man, and Plato does not so much as even mention his own
name in these texts – except on two very significant occasions. The first is Socrates’ defense of his way of life when he stands trial and is ultimately sentenced to death in the Apology. The second is his discourse on the immortality of the soul as he awaits death in the
Phaedo, and it is to this that I will now turn, as if following traces of blood that lead to the scene of Plato’s unfilial crime against the Being of “father Parmenides”.
The only way that Plato could in some way preserve the aloof
utter ineffability of the ideal realm of Parmenides’ One, once he has
allowed the forms and matter to touch in the receptacle and without
making any concessions to Becoming, is to defer the experience of
perfection – devoid of all physicality – to a place and time beyond
death. In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that leading a life of using one’s inner and inherent reason one stays a longer and longer time
in the realm of ultimate reality between the deaths and rebirths of a
purifying process of reincarnation. This results in “recollection”, the phenomenon in which people look at an imperfect circle, a shadow
or semblance in the physical world, and somehow knows that it is imperfect, implying they know of a perfect circle though they have never seen one. Through this process one comes closer and closer
to leading the perfect philosophic life each time one is reborn until
final y, one evolves to the point where upon death one’s soul is freed from substance (the body, senses and phenomenal world) altogether to directly experience the ultimate reality of eternal forms. While living one should try to assimilate this ideal immaterial state as
much as possible, by withdrawing within oneself and using the mind
to transcend the body.
44 Ibid.,
Second Letter: 314 a-c.
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In the Phaedo, which stands within Plato’s corpus as the
crucifixion stands within the New Testament, Plato writes:
Surely the soul can reason best when it is free of all distractions
such as hearing or sight or pain or pleasure of any kind – that is,
when it leaves the body to its own devices, becomes as isolated as
possible, and strives for reality while avoiding as much physical
contact and association as it can...
Don’t you think that the person who is most likely to achieve
[knowledge] flawlessly is the one who approaches each object, as
far as possible, with the unaided intel ect, without taking account of any sense of sight in his thinking, or dragging any other sense into his reckoning – the man who pursues the truth by applying his
pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated
object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes
and ears and virtual y all the rest of his body, as an impediment
which, if present, prevents the soul from attaining to the truth
and clear thinking? Is not this the person... who will reach the
goal of reality, if anybody can?45
In the drama of the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates welcomes his death because he claims to believe it is only in an ideal realm free of the
mortal coil that true knowledge is possible:
If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body,
then either it is total y impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is
only possible after death, because it is only then that the soul will
be isolated and independent of the body.
...he will never attain to wisdom worthy of the name elsewhere
than in the next world...46
Yet at the outset of the dialogue, when Phaedo is recounting all of
those who were present at the execution he says the following:
45 Ibid.,
Phaedo: 65c–66a
46 Ibid., 67a; 68b
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Echecrates: Who were actual y there, Phaedo?
Phaedo: Why, of the Athenians there were this man Apollodorus,
and Critobulus and his father, and then there were Hermogenes
and Epigenes and Aeschines and Antisthenes. Oh yes, and
Ctesipus of Paeanis, and Menexenus, and some other local
people. I believe that Plato was il .47
“...I believe that Plato was il .” It is likely that no author has ever written, nor ever will write, with such outstanding wit and such
masterful y subtle irony. Unless Plato was on his own deathbed,
nothing would have stopped him from attending the execution
of his teacher, the teacher of whom he was the brightest and most
beloved disciple. Nor is Plato merely saying this to write himself
out of a scene that he is expected to have been present at in order
to preserve his distance from his dialogues. Except for the case
in the Apology, where establishing his presence is key to lending credibility to his ‘transcript’ of the trial proceedings that led up to the death sentence, Plato never mentions his presence or absence
in any of Socrates’ conversations. He allows it to be tacitly assumed
that he was there while at the same time excusing himself from
being responsible for giving a literal account. Yet here he goes to the extent of naming all those who were present and explicitly excluding
himself. Oh and by the way “...I believe that Plato was il .” What an
outrageously nonchalant and matter-of-fact tone! Plato is bending
over backwards to get us to read those preposterous words over and
over again, because he knows that we know damn well that he was
there. Those words must mean something else – they must constitute some tremendous hint. I believe that Plato means to say that he was nauseated.
Why? Because here is Socrates, Plato’s beloved teacher, on
the verge of a tragical y unjust death and he is surrounded by his
disciples as if by frightened children. Cebes himself says to Socrates:
“Probably even in us there is a little boy who has these childish
terrors. Try to persuade him not to be afraid of death as though it
47 Ibid.
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were a bogey.”48 Like a father who must force a smile and cheer up
in the face of adversity so as to al ay the fear of his children, Socrates tel s his disciples:
If I did not expect to enter the company, first, of other wise
and good gods, and secondly of men now dead who are better
than those who are in this world now, it is true that it would be
unjust for me not to grieve at death. As it is, you can be assured that I expect to find myself among good men; while I would not
particularly insist on this, I assure you that I could commit myself upon [this] point if I could upon anything...49
...This makes Plato sick. Whereas Socrates clearly states that if pure intellection in the absence of embodiment and sensory mediation
is not possible after death then rational knowledge is not possible at al , here he is contradictorily describing the state after death as one experienced by means of what the Greeks called a soma pneumatikon
or spectral body – which is a ‘sensory’ medium of experience even if
not a material on
e. Very tangible agonies and mundane pleasures are
experienced by means of it, so that pure intellection appears elusive
even after death and before rebirth. In the Republic Plato elaborates on this view, which he inherited from the esoteric Pythagorean
Order of which he was a member. Although Plato’s belief in
reincarnation is set forth in several other texts as wel , it is in the story of Er the son of Armenius from 614b–621d of the Republic that we are presented with his most extensive treatment of the subject. In
fact, its importance cannot be overemphasized since Plato chooses
to bring the entire text of the Republic to its culmination and closure with this very tale.
Er is a soldier to whom it is given to have a Near Death Experience,
with total recal , so that he may inform the living of what transpires after death. He bears witness to the process that finds its eastern
analogue in the bardo state described most famously in the Tibetan 48 Ibid., 77e.
49 Ibid., 63c, my emphasis.
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Book of the Dead.50 As in the eastern version, there are heavenly realms where souls enjoy extraordinarily pleasant experiences and
hellish underworld realms where they are subjected to all manner
of terrifying visions and torturous trials, but neither of these states is permanent. The souls of the deceased ultimately choose their
next lives, and whether these are honorable and rewarding lives or
whether they are miserable and violent ones is determined on the
basis of how consciously and deliberatively they are able to make
their choice.
It sometimes happens that those who have spent a long time in
the heaven realms on account of having lived a good previous life
become complacent and unconsciously choose a terrible subsequent
life. They fail to look deeply enough into a vision of it so as to see beyond the thril s that shimmer on its surface. Sometimes those
who have just come from tribulations in the hellish underworld
have had the awareness to choose more soberly beaten into them.
The extent to which a soul’s awareness has been cultivated correlates
to how much of its previous lives will be forgotten and how much
it will be able to instructively remember so as not to repeat prior
mistakes. Each must drink a measure from the river Lethe while in the netherworld, but those who are undisciplined find it sweet
and gulp down a great deal more. In other words, the cycle of
experiences that progressively purifies the soul until it becomes that of a philosopher is a very long one, and there may be many regresses
where what appear to be good men suffer a great fal , perhaps even
to the level of being reborn as an animal, and have to work their way
up again. So, while Socrates might be somewhat confident that he
will fare well after drinking the hemlock, the reassurances that he
gives to his fearful disciples in Phaedo are most certainly soothing lies. Consider the implications of this realization given that Socrates seals this consolation with the claim that he is as sure of it as he is or ever was of anything. The full import of these words will be drawn
out only as I conclude this essay.
50 W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
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Final y, it is worth noting that Plato’s views on the equality of
women to men may be bound up with the fact that, as Er recounts,
not only can women choose rebirth as men but the souls of eminent
men sometimes reincarnate as women. This would, in fact, have to
be the case for there to be female philosophers, since the philosophic soul is the most perfected and it could have freely chosen its sex.
The soul still has a sex and indeed may have hellish or heavenly
sexual experiences by means of the soma pneumatikon, both in the state between lives and even once it is perfected and chooses the life of a philosopher whose highest calling is to serve as a republican
Guardian. This further emphasizes how profoundly Plato’s whole
afterlife scheme undermines the idea of the kind of enduring
airtight intellectual isolation from sensory experience that Socrates
claims would be required to definitively demonstrate the possibility
of perfectly rational knowledge.
The tale of Er is not the only part of Republic that undermines this core tenant of exoteric academic Platonism. The following passages
of the Republic 51 on the idea of the Good – the form of forms – are also relevant, so much so that they deserve to be quoted at length;
they are perhaps the key to unlocking Plato’s unwritten doctrine:
The good, then, is the end of all endeavor, the object on which
every heart is set, whose existence it divines, though it finds it
difficult to grasp just what it is...
‘We shall be quite satisfied if you give an account of the good
similar to that you gave of justice and self-control and the rest.’
‘And so shall I too, my dear chap,’ I replied, ‘but I’m afraid it’s
beyond me, and if I try I shall only make a fool of myself and be
laughed at. So please let us give up asking for the present what
the good is in itself; I’m afraid that to reach what I think would be
a satisfactory answer is beyond the range of our present inquiry.
But I will tell you, if you like, about something which seems to
51 Hamilton, Collected Dialogues of Plato, Republic: 505e; 506d–507a; 508c; 508e–509c.
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me to be a child of the good, and to resemble it very closely – or
would you rather I didn’t?’
‘Tell us about the child and you can owe us your account of the
parent,’ he said.
‘It’s a debt I wish I could pay back to you in ful , instead of only
paying interest on the loan,’ I replied. ‘But for the present you
must accept my description of the child of the good as interest...
...though the sun is not itself sight, it is the cause of sight and is seen by the sight it causes... ‘Wel , that is what I called the child
of the good,’ I said. ‘The good has begotten it in its own likeness,
and it bears the same relation to sight and visible objects in the
visible realm that the good bears to intelligence and intelligible
objects in the intelligible realm.’
...‘Then what gives the objects of knowledge their truth and the
knower’s mind the power of knowing is the form of the good.
It is the cause of knowledge and truth, and you will be right to
think of it as being itself known, and yet as being something
other than, and even more splendid than, knowledge and truth,
splendid as they are. And just as it was right to think of light and
sight as being like the sun, but wrong to think of them as being
the sun itself, so here again it is right to think of knowledge and
truth as being like the good, but wrong to think of either of them
as being the good, whose position must be ranked still higher.’
...‘The sun, I think you will agree, not only makes the things
we see visible, but causes the processes of generation, growth
and nourishment, without itself being such a process.’ ‘True’
‘The good therefore may be said to be source not only of the
intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their
being and reality; yet it is not itself that reality, but is beyond
it, and superior to it in dignity and power.’ ‘It real y must be
miraculously transcendent,’ remarked Glaucon...
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Taken together these passages suggest the following. The “form
of the good” is the Sun in light of which all of the other forms are
il uminated. Yet it must in some way be fundamental y different from
the other forms, because while Plato’s Socrates can explain “justice”,
“beauty”, etc... he cannot explain the “form of forms”. While at first he feigns that this is simply due to lack of skil , he ultimately admits that an explanation of the Good in-itself will never be forthcoming because it is inherently impossible. We are told to content ourselves
with the simile of the Sun, which suggests that the form of the Good
is to the other forms in the intelligible realm as the Sun is to the
objects of perception in the sensuous realm.
So far this is no great revelation – but let us now recall how the mixture of the forms and matter, Being and Non-Being, in
the receptacle which gives rise to becoming, compromises the
transcendent sanctity of the forms. If the division between the
ideal and sensuous worlds col apses according to the logic of Plato’s
metaphysics, then the form of the Good becomes Heraclitus’ never-
setting Sun. Is it real y an accident that this Heraclitean symbol lies at the heart of Plato’s philosophy? Or does Plato choose to place it
there as a sign that in him the Heraclitean vision of his youth has
surreptitiously assimilated, encompassed and triumphed over
Parmenides’ idealist revolt? Let us read on from where we left off in
the Republic:
I think you know that students of geometry and calculation and
the like begin by assuming there are odd and even numbers,
geometrical figures and the three forms of angle, and other
kindred items in their respective subjects; these they regard as
known, having put them forward as basic assumptions which
it is quite unnecessary to explain to themselves or anyone else
on the grounds that they are obvious to everyone. Starting from
them, they proceed through a series of consistent steps to the
conclusion which they set out to find...
...You know too that they make use of and argue about visible
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