The Last Days of Socrates

by Plato

  ‘Most emphatically, Socrates.’

  ‘Very well, then,’ said Socrates; ‘if this is true, there is good reason for anyone who reaches the end of this journey which lies before me to hope that there, if anywhere, he will attain the object to which all our efforts have been directed in (c) life gone by. So this journey which is now ordained for me carries a happy prospect for any other man also who believes that his mind has been made ready – and pure, so to speak.’

  ‘It does indeed,’ said Simmias.

  ‘And doesn’t this “purification”, as we saw some time ago in our discussion, consist in separating the soul as much as possible from the body, and accustoming it to withdraw from its dispersal throughout the body and concentrate itself in isolation? And to have its dwelling, so far as it can, both now (d) and in the future, alone by itself, freed from the chains of the body.35 Does not that follow?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Simmias.

  ‘Is not what we call death a freeing and separation of soul from body?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he said.

  ‘And the desire to free the soul is found chiefly, or rather only, in the true philosopher; in fact the philosopher’s occupation consists precisely in the freeing and separation of soul from body. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  (e) ‘Well then, as I said at the beginning, if a man has trained himself throughout his life to live in a state as close as possible to death, would it not be ridiculous for him to be distressed when death comes to him?’

  ‘It would, of course.’

  ‘Then it is a fact, Simmias, that true philosophers make dying their profession, and that to them of all men death is least alarming. Look at it in this way. If they are thoroughly dissatisfied with the body, and long to have their souls in isolation, when this happens would it not be entirely unreasonable to panic and be annoyed? Would they not naturally be glad to set out for the place where there is a prospect 68(a) of attaining the object of their lifelong desire, which is wisdom, and of escaping from an association of which they disapproved? Surely there are many who have chosen of their own free will to follow dead beloveds36 [and wives and sons] to the next world, in the hope of seeing and meeting there the persons whom they loved. If this is so, will a true lover of wisdom who has firmly grasped this same conviction – that he will never attain to wisdom worthy of the name elsewhere (b) than in the next world – will he be grieved at dying? Will he not be glad to make that journey? We must suppose so, my comrade; that is, if he is a genuine “philosopher”;37 because then he will be of the firm belief that he will never find wisdom in all its purity in any other place. If this is so, would it not be quite unreasonable (as I said just now) for such a man to be afraid of death?’

  ‘It would, indeed.’

  ‘So if you see anyone distressed at the prospect of dying,’ said Socrates, ‘it will be proof enough that he is a lover not of (c) wisdom but of the body (this same man would presumably be a lover of money) and of prestige, one or the other, or both.’38

  ‘Yes, you are quite right.’

  ‘Doesn’t it follow, Simmias,’ he went on, ‘that the virtue which we call courage belongs primarily to those of philosophic disposition?’39

  ‘Yes, no doubt it does,’ he said.

  ‘Take temperance, too, as it is understood even in the popular sense – not being carried away by the desires, but preserving a decent indifference towards them: is not this appropriate only to those who regard the body with the greatest indifference and spend their lives in philosophy?’

  (d) ‘Certainly,’ he said.

  ‘If you care to consider courage and temperance as practised by other people,’ said Socrates, ‘you will find them illogical.’40

  ‘How so, Socrates?’

  ‘You know, don’t you, that everyone except the philosopher regards death as a great evil?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Isn’t it true that when a brave man faces death he does so through fear of something worse?’

  ‘Yes, it is true.’

  ‘So in everyone except the philosopher courage is due to fear and dread; although it is illogical that fear and cowardice should make a man brave.’

  (e) ‘Quite so.’

  ‘What about self-controlled people? Is it not, in just the same way, a sort of self-indulgence that makes them temperate? We may say that this is impossible, but all the same those who practise this simple form of temperance are in much the same case as that which I have just described. They are afraid of losing other pleasures which they desire, so they refrain from one kind because they cannot resist the other. Although 69(a) they define self-indulgence as the condition of being ruled by pleasure, it is really because they cannot resist some pleasures that they succeed in resisting others; which amounts to what I said just now – that they control themselves, in a sense, by self-indulgence.’

  ‘Yes, that seems to be true.’

  ‘Wonderful, Simmias. No, I am afraid that, from the moral standpoint, it is not the right method to exchange one denomination of pleasure or pain or fear for another, like coins of different values. I suspect there is only one currency for which all these things should be exchanged, and that is wisdom. When they are sold for wisdom and purchased with it41 – (b) that’s when they really amount to courage and self-control and justice42 or, in a word, true virtue, when pleasures, fears, and all such things are added or subtracted with wisdom’s help; whereas when they’re exchanged in isolation from wisdom, I suspect that the resulting “virtue” is a mere illusion, slavish in fact, with nothing sound or honest about it. The (c) real thing, whether self-control or justice or courage, is in fact a kind of purification from all this kind of motivation, and wisdom itself is a sort of cleansing agent. Perhaps these people who have established religious initiations are not so far from the mark, and all the time there has been a hidden meaning beneath their claim that he who enters the next world uninitiated and unenlightened shall lie in the mire, but he who arrives there purified and enlightened shall dwell among the gods. You know how those involved in initiations say: “Many bear the emblem, but the devotees are few.”43 Well, in my opinion these devotees are simply those who have (d) lived the philosophic life in the right way; a company which, all through my life, I have done my best in every way to join, leaving nothing undone which I could do to attain this end. Whether I was right in this ambition, and whether we have achieved anything, we shall know for certain (God willing) when we reach the other world; and that, I imagine, will be fairly soon.

  (e) ‘This is the defence which I offer you, Simmias and Cebes, to show that it is natural for me to leave you and my earthly rulers without any feeling of grief or bitterness, since I believe that I shall find there, no less than here, good rulers and good friends. If I am any more convincing in my defence to you than I was to my Athenian jury, I shall be satisfied.’

  The challenge of Cebes and the Argument from Opposites. Socrates tries to establish the principle that opposites emerge from opposites, and consequently that the dead come from the living and the living from the dead. There are a number of problems, including ones of definition. The trickiest is what is actually meant by opposites, and indeed whether Plato consistently adheres to a single concept of an opposite. The principal opposites used to explain the Presocratic universe had been such physical pairs as wet/dry, light/dark, hot/cold. Plato tends to convert these to wetter/drier, etc. (cf. Philebus 25c–d), and he is concerned with the kind of process by which a given thing becomes wetter than it was previously rather than wetter than some other thing. Obviously what becomes wetter must have been drier before. The claim is that whatever substrate acquires a new predicate does so by acquiring (more of) a given quality than it previously had, and that, where the predicate has an opposite, it would previously have had (more of) the opposite quality. But Plato wants his rule to hold where there is no scale of (e.g.) temperature or humidity: becoming awake involves coming from a state of sleep, and beco
ming asleep involves departing from the waking state. So does not being dead involve coming from a state of life? And does not becoming alive involve coming from a state of death? One must also ask what it is that Plato can possibly think of as able to be alive and dead. Not souls, one might assume, for they are never dead, just embodied or disembodied; and how can it be argued that bodies become living which were previously dead? Is it previously dead people who become living people? The shadow of Heraclitus, who seems to have believed in a natural harmonious balance between opposite powers and opposite processes (and that this balance is the source of the preservation of the universe), is present throughout this section.44

  When Socrates had finished, Cebes made his reply. ‘The rest of your statement, Socrates,’ he said, ‘seems excellent to 70(a) me; but what you said about the soul leaves the average person with grave misgivings that when it’s released from the body it may no longer exist anywhere, but be dispersed and destroyed on the very day that the man himself dies, as soon as it is freed from the body; that as it emerges it may be dissipated like breath or smoke, and vanish away, so that it will nowhere amount to anything.45 Of course if it still existed as a complete unity in itself, released from all the evils which you have just described, there would be a strong and glorious hope, Socrates, that what you say is true. But I fancy (b) that it requires no little faith and assurance to believe that the soul exists after death and retains some active force and intelligence.’

  ‘Quite true, Cebes,’ said Socrates. ‘But what are we to do about it? Is it your wish that we should go on speculating about the subject, to see whether this view is likely to be true or not?’

  ‘For my part,’ said Cebes, ‘I should be very glad to hear what you think about it.’

  ‘At any rate,’ said Socrates, ‘I hardly think that anyone who heard us now – even a comic poet – would say that I am (c) playing about46 and discoursing on subjects which do not concern me. So if that is how you feel, we had better continue our inquiry. Let us approach it from this point of view: do the souls of the departed exist in the other world or not?

  ‘There is an old legend, which we’ve been recalling,47 to the effect that they do exist there, after leaving here; and that they return again to this world and come into being from the dead.48 If this is so – that the living come into being again from the dead – does it not follow that our souls would exist (d) in the other world? They could not come into being again if they did not exist; and it will be sufficient proof that my contention is true if it really becomes apparent that the living come from the dead, and from nowhere else.49 But if this is not so, we shall need some other argument.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Cebes.

  ‘If you want to understand the question more readily,’ said Socrates, ‘consider it with reference not only to human beings but to all animals and plants. (e) Let us see whether in general everything that comes to be so of anything comes to be50 in this way and no other – opposites from opposites, wherever there is an opposite; as for instance beauty is opposite to ugliness and right to wrong, and there are countless other examples. Let us consider whether it is a necessary law that everything which has an opposite is brought about from that opposite and from no other source: for example, when a thing becomes bigger, it must, I suppose, have been smaller first before it became bigger?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And similarly if it becomes smaller, it must be bigger first, 71(a) and become smaller afterwards?’

  ‘That is so,’ said Cebes.

  ‘And the weaker comes from the stronger, and the faster from the slower?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘What about this: if a thing becomes worse, is it not from being better, and if more just, from being more unjust?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Are we satisfied, then,’ said Socrates, ‘that all opposites are brought about in this way – from opposites?’51

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Here is another question. Do not these examples present another feature, that between each pair of opposites there (b) are two processes of generation, one from the first to the second, and another from the second to the first? Between a larger and a smaller object are there not the processes of increase and decrease, and do we not describe them in this way as increasing and decreasing?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cebes.

  ‘Is it not the same with separating and combining, cooling and heating, and all the rest of them? Even if we sometimes do not use the actual terms, must it not in fact hold good universally that they come one from the other, and that there is a process from each which brings about the other?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Cebes.

  (c) ‘Well then,’ said Socrates, ‘is there an opposite to living, as sleeping is opposite to waking?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being dead.’52

  ‘So if they are opposites, they come from one another, and have their two processes of generation between the two of them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Very well, then,’ said Socrates, ‘I will state one pair of opposites which I mentioned just now; the opposites themselves and the processes between them; and you shall state the other. My opposites are sleeping and waking, and I say that waking comes from sleeping and sleeping from waking, (d) and that the processes between them are going to sleep and waking up. Does that satisfy you,’ he asked, ‘or not?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Now you tell me in the same way,’ he went on, ‘about life and death. Do you not admit that death is the opposite of life?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And that they come from one another?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what comes from the living?’

  ‘The dead.’

  ‘And what,’ asked Socrates, ‘comes from the dead?’

  ‘I must admit,’ he said, ‘that it is the living.’

  ‘So it is from the dead, Cebes, that living things and people come?’

  (e) ‘Evidently.’

  ‘Then our souls do exist in the other world?’53

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘And one of the two processes in this case is really quite certain – dying is certain enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Cebes.

  ‘What shall we do, then? Shall we omit the complementary process, and leave a defect here in the law of nature? Or must we supply an opposite process to that of dying?’

  ‘Surely we must supply it,’ he said.

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘Coming to life again.’54

  ‘Then if there is such a thing as coming to life again,’ said 72(a) Socrates, ‘it must be a process from death to life?’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘So we agree upon this too: that the living have come from the dead no less than the dead from the living.55 But I think we decided that if this was so, it was a sufficient proof that the souls of the dead must exist in some place from which they are reborn.’

  ‘It seems to me, Socrates,’ he said, ‘that this follows necessarily from our agreement.’

  ‘I think there is another way56 too, Cebes, in which you can see that we were not wrong in our agreement. If there were not a constant correspondence in the process of generation (b) between the two sets of opposites, going round in a sort of cycle; if generation were a straight path to the opposite extreme without any return to the starting-point or any deflection, do you realize that in the end everything would have the same quality and reach the same state, and change would cease altogether?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing difficult to understand,’ replied Socrates. ‘For example, if “falling asleep” existed, and “waking up” did not balance it by making something come out of sleep, you must (c) realize that in the end everything would make Endymion57 look foolish; he would be nowhere, because the whole world would be in the same state – asleep. And if everything were combined
and nothing separated, we should soon have Anaxagoras’s “all things together”.58 In just the same way, my dear Cebes, if everything that has some share of life were to die, and if after death the dead remained in that form and did not come to life again, would it not be quite inevitable that in the end everything should be dead and nothing alive? (d) If living things came from other living things,59 and the living things died, what possible means could prevent their number from being exhausted by death?’

  (e) ‘None that I can see, Socrates,’ said Cebes. ‘What you say seems to be perfectly true.’

  ‘Yes, Cebes,’ he said, ‘if anything is true, I believe that this is, and we were not mistaken in our agreement upon it; coming to life again is a fact, and it is a fact that the living come from the dead, and a fact that the souls of the dead exist.’

  The Theory of Recollection is introduced as further evidence that our souls have an existence before this earthly life. Cebes no doubt thinks of the theory as supporting the Orphic doctrines to which the previous argument had tried to give credence. That some learning is in fact the recollection of knowledge familiar from a previous existence is ‘proved’ in this dialogue by the fact that men appear to have clear concepts of (e.g.) equality itself, untainted by the imperfections of any earthly pair of equals. The difference between earthly equals and actual equality is established by the way in which the former may look unequal from a particular viewpoint, but no viewpoint could give the Idea of equality an unequal appearance. It is granted that earthly equals bring to mind the concept of actual equality, yet cannot strictly teach us that concept, since there is at least one predicate applicable to the concept at odds with a predicate of the earthly instances. Plato’s purpose here seems to go beyond the desire to prove the soul pre-exists the body. There is a discussion of the mechanics of recollection processes in general, which, being not strictly necessary for the argument, must have had its own independent importance for Plato in the context of this work.60 There is also considerable attention to the difference between the particulars of this world and the Platonic Ideas, and more effort devoted to picturing the Ideas as a worthy object of the philosopher’s knowledge which can only be properly experienced in isolation from the body.