Plato certainly did not do all the work that is required to answer the questions he is raising. He is only arguing, at least here in the Euthyphro, that it is a job for human reason, and not for the gods. Aristotle, who grandly advanced moral philosophy, didn’t do all the work, either. They no more arrived at the definitive answers to their questions than did Thales and Co. in raising questions of physics and cosmology. Progress in one subject is as difficult as progress in the other, though for quite different reasons. Progress in philosophy is difficult for the same reason that its progress, once made, becomes invisible. What is in need of changing for progress to be made are convictions constitutive of points of view. It is both hard to discover these convictions—assimilated into our points of view as they are—and, once the changes are assimilated, it is hard to see that anything has changed. Since progress in philosophy is as difficult as progress in the sciences, it is unreasonable to expect one man—or one generation, or one millennium—to do all that needs doing.
And of course, despite the Euthyphro Argument, religious authorities managed to monopolize the moral discussion through the millennia, temporarily interrupting the kind of work that Plato was arguing had to be done for us to begin to acquire the knowledge we need. This is not to say that Plato is not himself respectful of religion, most especially of its power to keep the non-philosophical masses on the straight and narrow. One need only read his chilling Book X of the Laws, in which he comes dangerously close to making freethinking illegal, to know how essential for social stability he judged religion to be. The non-philosophical masses cannot be expected to grasp the required subtle reasoning, and for them there can only be religion—or so he seems to conclude in the very last years of his life.
Though Plato was optimistic that moral actions grounded on knowledge could be achieved, he was not optimistic about how many can achieve it. It’s no wonder, since ultimately his notion of moral excellence—of the aretē worth the achieving—demands that the excellence of the cosmos be assimilated into oneself, become a part of one’s own moral and intellectual constitution. To live the life worth the living one must be able to grasp and internalize the goodness that makes the cosmos worth the existing. One must integrate the beautiful proportionality of the character of the physical universe into one’s own moral character, and then, and only then, will one see oneself in relation to all else—and all others—in the right perspective, the distortions of the cave corrected. This is not a dispassionate process. Plato always stressed how much love is involved in the process. But it’s love of an impersonal kind, not love for persons, that reforms one’s moral being. Plato would have approved this paragraph from Spinoza’s Ethics: “Therefore, without intelligence, there is not rational life: and things are only good, in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life, which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man’s perfecting of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil” (Appendix, Part IV, v). Morality necessarily crosses, for these philosophers, through the headiest of intellectual terrain, and that is a path that—I don’t think they’re particularly happy about this—few can follow. I think that Plato—and Spinoza—would have wished it otherwise, but there it is. Reality doesn’t conform itself to our wishes. But given his view of how the moral perspective is to be achieved, it’s no wonder that Plato wasn’t hopeful that universal progress could be made in its achievement.
Plato stood at the beginning of the self-critical process of our reasoning out our moral convictions. He overestimated the unilateral role of moral reason, underestimated the role of the moral emotions—our sense of fairness, our capacity for empathy. He could not have known how moral arguments and moral emotions, together with social movements and political agitation, could join together in complicated ways that have slowly and jerkily brought us to where we are today, which is hardly at the finish of the process. There, where he stood, which was at the beginning, he could not possibly have foreseen how it would play out in the moral lives of successive generations, nor how it’s still being played out.…
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So that is how Plato presents Socrates amusing himself before going in to meet his accuser. Plato sets two of his late dialogues, the Sophist and the Statesman, the very next day. Socrates had parted from Theodorus and Theaetetus the day before, as presented in the Theaetetus, with the promise that they would meet on the morrow to continue their exploration of the nature of knowledge (210d).
The Sophist opens with Theodorus, Theaetetus, and Socrates showing up for that appointment (216a). It’s the morning after what would have been, for anyone else, a disheartening appearance before the archon basileus, who judged Meletus’ case to be of sufficient merit to go to trial. But no mention is made of the event. It is we, the readers, who supply the missing information by knowing the order of the internal dramas of the Theaetetus, the Euthyphro, and the Sophist.
Even so indefatigable an arguer as Socrates might be feeling his age after what must have been a dispiriting demonstration of insincere moralizing on the part of Meletus (who will be shown up, in the Apology, as just such a moralizer), on top of the theologically confused moralizing of Euthyphro. That’s quite a lot of bad moralizing for someone like Socrates to have to ingest, and perhaps it has left him feeling philosophically dyspeptic. Or perhaps there is some other explanation for the odd thing that Plato proceeds to do in the Sophist, and to repeat in the Statesman, which is to have his Socrates bow out of a philosophical discussion in favor of a younger man, the mathematically gifted Theaetetus, who had so impressed him the day before, according to the internal chronology of the dialogues. And there is someone else who gets thrown into the thick of the philosophical action as well. Theodorus has brought along a guest, referred to as the Stranger, a native of Elea and a follower of Parmenides, the great metaphysician whom Plato, in the Parmenides, had discoursing with a far younger Socrates, whom he had philosophically bested. But here Plato goes even further in relegating Socrates to the philosophical sidelines: “Then you may choose any of the company you will,” Socrates says to the Stranger. “They will all follow you and respond amenably. But if you take my advice, you will choose one of the younger men—Theaetetus here or any other you may prefer.” So it is the Stranger and Theaetetus who together worry the concepts of being and non-being, the one and the many, ultimately chasing down the problem of how it is that we can intelligibly speak of that which is not. Plato’s intuitions tell him this is a technical problem; and he was right. Gottlob Frege was quoted back in chapter α as a logician with strong Platonist tendencies. The developments in mathematical logic that he made have significantly sharpened the issues—and disagreements—that still linger over the logical structure of propositions containing non-referential terms, such as “the present Czar of Russia,” “the highest prime number,” or “the current liberal members of the Republican Party.”
It has been a busy couple of days for Plato’s Socrates, including meeting a wonderful young mathematician and formulating the basic questions of epistemology with him, trying to get a diviner-priest to see how moral theory cannot be grounded in the received arbitrariness of divine choices; a preliminary showdown with those accusing him of impiety and corruption of the young; followed by a long session of heavy metaphysics and philosophy of language. But Plato is still not ready to have his Socrates kick back and relax. There is still the Statesman.
To the Sophist’s gathering of Socrates, Theodorus, Theaetetus, and the Eleatic Stranger, Plato adds one more to join in the task of dialectically defining the statesman. This is a bland young man with the startling name of Socrates, referred to throughout the dialogue as the Younger Socrates. (He has been present, albeit silently, during the discussions of both the Theaetetus and the Sophist.)
The methodological problem that concerns both the Sophist and the Statesman is the problem of identifying the joint at which to cut between concepts. So though the Statesman is ultimately conc
erned with the kind of person who is the best ruler, and the kind of knowledge he is required to have, it’s also self-consciously devoted to methodology. Overseen by the Stranger, the two youngsters, Theaetetus and the Younger Socrates, carry on the dialectical discussion, Socrates designating them worthy replacements with the odd remark that Theaetetus physically resembles Socrates and the Younger Socrates has his name (257d). The temporal setting of the dialogue manages to keep the death drama of Socrates in the frame, even while Socrates as a character is unceremoniously retired, the flimsiest of similarities to his person—his ugliness, his appellation—offered as justifications for having others take his place. Is Plato, who is experimenting with different philosophical techniques, perhaps suggesting that some are suitable for one sort of problem, others for other problems, but none is indispensable? This is an interpretation for Socrates’ marginalization that some have suggested. Or is it rather another kind of indispensability that Plato is denying here? No one person is indispensable to philosophy. The process has been initiated, and it will overtake and improve upon any one philosopher, no matter how extraordinary. Process over persons. Love of philosophy should never be narrowed down into love of a particular philosopher, for then it will deteriorate into the hermeneutics of dogma, become yet another, albeit recondite, way for our thinking to be rendered thoughtless, and we’ll find ourselves back inside the cave, chained together with our learned colleagues, staring at PowerPoint projections instead of those cast by the puppets of Plato’s cave. A technological advance, but we’ll still be in the dark. It’s still a danger among professional philosophers that some who devote their lives to excavating the system of some chosen dense figure—a Kant, a Wittgenstein, a Heidegger—can tolerate no suggestion that the chosen one didn’t achieve, all by himself, the completion of philosophy. Plato is perhaps here warning us against this tendency, by unceremoniously retiring the thinker who has become so identified with the Platonic dialogue that it’s now all but impossible to disentangle Plato’s Socrates from the historical man. This time it’s Plato, and not the Athenians, who is decreeing that Socrates must die.
The three remaining dialogues of the seven crowded into the summer of 399 are the Apology, which gives us Socrates’ defense at his trial; the Crito, which shows us Socrates in prison, a day or two before the end, visited in the middle of the night by his childhood friend, a distraught, insomniac Crito, who has arranged for Socrates’ escape and has only to convince Socrates to flout his city’s laws and save his skin, which he declines to do, on the basis, of course, of a philosophical argument; and the Phaedo, which gives us a daylong conversation on the last day of Socrates’ life, as well as an account of his dying.
The Phaedo presents Socrates in conversation with his friends, mostly young men, though the faithful heartbroken Crito is present, as is Apollodorus, another interesting character. Apollodorus had been a successful businessman but left his affairs to follow Socrates in the last few years of the philosopher’s life. Xenophon describes him as one of those who never left Socrates’ side, and he seems to have had a reputation as an eccentric. He is the narrator of the Symposium, telling his secondhand account of the long-ago party—he mentions that at the time of the related events he would have been a mere boy—to an unnamed friend, who at one point makes reference to Apollodorus’ nickname, “Maniac.” Apollodorus is obviously an emotional fellow, as he demonstrates in the Phaedo, unable to stop crying through the whole dialogue (117d).
As the devotees arrive before daybreak at Socrates’ prison cell, his wailing wife, their child on her knee, is dismissed from the room. “Socrates looked at Crito. Crito, he said, someone had better take her home” (60a). As the wife of a man soon to die it was appropriate for her, according to custom, to lead the mourners, but Socrates is not going to depart at this date from his atopia, his strangeness, meaning that what is appropriate for others does not suit him. (But did Socrates really send Xanthippe and his son off so coolly, or is this Plato’s notion of how a philosopher regards the conventional sentimentality of family life?) It is only right that Socrates not be deprived of his pleasure before he drains his cup of hemlock—this pleasure being, of course, philosophical discussion, as Xanthippe, as a knowing wife, had already foreseen, exclaiming as his friends come trooping in that this is the last opportunity they’ll have for discussing philosophy.
The philosophical theme, on this occasion, is the timely question of the soul’s immortality. Are there any grounds to believe that a person can survive his death? “I suppose for one who is soon to leave this world there is no more suitable occupation than inquiring into our views about the future life, and trying to imagine what it is like. What else can one do in the time before sunset?” Plato has his Socrates asking with a poet’s double entendre.
The Apology and the Crito are both chronologically sorted as belonging near the beginning of Plato’s writing career, by those who countenance such sorting at all. In fact, the Apology is often regarded as the first of Plato’s dialogues, and, some claim, the most historically faithful among them. Many had attended Socrates’ trial that day in 399 and would have known for themselves what Socrates had said in his ineffectual defense, so perhaps Plato didn’t stray too far from the historical record.22
The Phaedo, in contrast, was written later, and the opinions and arguments that Plato has Socrates offering on the subject of the soul’s immortality depend not only on attitudes more temperamentally characteristic, perhaps, of Plato than of Socrates—for example, a marked antipathy for the bodily—but also on the metaphysical and epistemological ideas that Plato most probably explored on his own, such as the Theory of Forms. So, for example, there is an argument that appeals to the Theory of Forms and to Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection (anamnesis) of those Forms: Since none of our embodied experience in this world could provide us with the knowledge of absolutes that our knowledge of the Forms yields us; since everything we experience in this life is judged as falling short of the perfection we nevertheless must know, if only to judge all things of this world as falling short of perfection; it follows that we must have become acquainted with these exemplars, of which particulars are “only imperfect copies” (75b), in a disembodied previous existence (75c). So if there was personal existence before our being birthed into this embodied life, establishing the metaphysical possibility of disembodied existence, then why not personal existence after our departing from this embodied life? There is still controversy over how committed to the thesis of immortality Plato was, even though it became such a cornerstone of Christian Platonism. This is the dialogue where he most rigorously explores reasons to accept the proposition, and he doesn’t end the dialogue with a conclusive endorsement of it. But then there is still controversy over whether Plato endorses any substantive propositions, or even endorses the endorsing of propositions.23
Also relevant in demarcating the historical Socrates from the Socrates of Plato’s Phaedo is the strong strain of Pythagoreanism that runs throughout the dialogue. The cult that surrounded the seer Pythagoras (who died in 495 B.C.E.) combined mathematics and otherworldly mysticism, including a belief in the transmigration of souls. After Socrates’ execution, Plato removed himself from Athens for around ten years—perhaps out of aversion to his city or out of a feeling of danger—and spent time in the Pythagorean communities of southern Italy. Pythagoreanism looked on this earthly life as an opportunity to purify the soul so that it might be liberated from the incessantly revolving wheel of birth and rebirth, with mathematics—which still, to many, offers intimations of eternity—the wormhole to escape. The Pythagoreanism to which Plato was exposed, in the years after Socrates’ death, separated him further from Socrates. The Pythagorean intuition that the form for rendering reality intelligible is supplied by mathematical ratios influenced him profoundly, ultimately yielding him his conception of the Sublime Braid and the means to make good on Socrates’ search for the kind of knowledge that is also virtue.
There are refere
nces to Pythagoreanism throughout the Phaedo. Two of the most active participants, the lovers Simmias and Cebes, have ties with the Pythagorean community. And the slant toward Pythagoreanism is announced in the framing story:
It is a few weeks or months after Socrates’ execution. Phaedo, one of Socrates’ young men, is recounting the story of Socrates’ death to Echecrates of Phlius, who is a Pythagorean. Phlius, which lay between Athens and Elis, was one of the refuges to which the mathematico-mystical Pythagoreans fled after the destruction of their original settlement in Croton, where they had been politically active. It was their political activism that had stirred up trouble, leaving the nonagenarian Pythagoras and many of his followers dead.
We aren’t told the background story of the eponymous character in Phaedo. According to Diogenes, who got it from Hieronymus Cardianus, Phaedo had been a former aristocrat from Elis, brought to Athens as a captive and sold into the most degrading of all slavery, that of a catamite. According to the same source, it was Socrates who appealed to Crito, a man of means, to buy the boy’s freedom. Christian writers, relying on Diogenes, drew moral lessons from Phaedo’s reform, but, it goes without saying, there is debate over whether Diogenes’ gossip about Phaedo can be trusted.24 During the dialogue, Socrates absentmindedly strokes Phaedo’s hair (89b), presumably worn long in the Spartan style.
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