Phaedo gives Echecrates the Pythagorean a complete account of Socrates’ last hours. It begins with Phaedo, together with a handful of other devotees, entering the prison cell to see Socrates “just released from his chains” (59e), preparing the way for the metaphorical depiction of death as a freeing of the soul from the “shackles of the body” (67d), a very Pythagorean conception. The extreme denigration of the body, its description as “a contamination” (66b) for which the soul’s purification is necessary, is an aspect of Pythagoreanism that Plato displays in the Phaedo, which is brimming with proto-Christian body-disgust. The best that this life can provide effects a separation from the body. This is what philosophy, strengthening our affinities to the abstract and impersonal, is (64a). Whereas in other dialogues the abstract can be interpreted as embedded in the structure of this world, an immanence rather than a transcendence—this is certainly true of the Timaeus, and can be read into other dialogues, including the Republic—the Phaedo seems to remove the abstract to another place, beyond space and time, to which our better selves, with their affinity for the abstract, may just possibly retreat after the final separation from our bodies is effected. This is a notion of immortality which got absorbed into Christian visions of heaven.
Phaedo, the former slave and catamite, is an appropriate narrator for a dialogue that conceives of death as both manumission and purification. He plays the role of Mary Magdalene to a Socratic Jesus. Plato makes a point of having Phaedo mention that Plato wasn’t present at this last conversation (59b), which I’ve always read as a distancing move on the part of Plato from the position that is being explored, together with Socrates’ argumentative tentativeness in actually affirming immortality.25 In other words, I don’t think that Plato was committed to the soul’s immortality in any robust heaven-is-there-to-receive-us kind of way. It was another proposition that Plato put on the table to explore, and, as usual, he sets the scene carefully. Socrates, his cheerfulness and objectivity intact,26 is facing a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and in a mood to give the Pythagorean proposition of survival after death his best shot, though either way—survival or not—he’s reconciled to his end. But the Christian Platonists, starting from the fourth century C.E., latched on to the Phaedo as giving Plato’s honest-to-God point of view, and through them the doctrine of the immortality of the soul has had a long afterlife.
In other dialogues, most especially the Timaeus, a more attenuated kind of immortality is proposed. To the extent that we take into ourselves, in knowledge and in love, the True-the Beautiful-the Good, to that extent we achieve a kind of immortality. This is an immortality as impersonal as true knowledge. In fact, it’s nothing more nor less than wisdom, that state of being that fuses together knowledge of, and love for, to on. It is an impersonal form of immortality in the sense that it offers no promise that a something uniquely personal—one’s own self, bearer of one’s attitudes and memories—will survive the body’s death. No disembodied soul is appealed to in the Timaeus as it is in the Phaedo.27 Instead the kind of immortality that we can achieve doesn’t negate our mortality. We are immortal only to the extent that we lose ourselves in the knowledge of reality, letting its sublimeness overtake us. We are immortal only to the extent that we allow our own selves to be rationalized by the sublime ontological rationality, ordering our own processes of thinking, desiring, and acting in accordance with the perfect proportions realized in the cosmos. We are then, while in this life, living sub specie aeternitatus, as Spinoza was to put it, expanding our finitude to encapture as much of infinity as we are able. Or as Plato put it in the Timaeus:
So if a man has become absorbed in his appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts are bound to become merely mortal. And so far as it is at all possible for a man to become thoroughly mortal, he cannot help but fully succeed in this, seeing that he has cultivated his mortality all along. On the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal, he can in no way fail to achieve this: constantly caring for his divine part as he does, keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him, he must indeed be supremely happy. And there is but one way to care for anything, and that is to provide for it the nourishment and the motions that are proper to it. And the motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thought and revolutions of the universe. (90a–b)
This notion of an immortality achieved within our (incurably) mortal lives is quite different from the possibility explored in the Phaedo. It is less Christian and more Greek. Just as the pre-philosophical Ethos of the Extraordinary had it, it is what we make of our lives in the short time that we’re given that alone can expand our lives—not outward into everlasting time but still into something extraordinary and “godlike,” and this is all the immortality that we mortals can know. Only it’s not in the “auditory renown” of widespread kleos that we can achieve this form of immortality. It’s by having, while we still live, our lives infused with infinity, our finitude “infinitized” by the vastness of beauty outside ourselves, allowing our love for it to overtake and dim even our love for ourselves. Outsized egos—even when attached to outsized intellects—are inconsistent with the life worth living as Plato envisions it.
Plato states in the Timaeus that it is only the very few who can achieve this kind of life. And so, to the extent that the best life is conceived in these terms, the many are excluded. “And of true belief, it must be said all men have a share, but of understanding, only the gods and a small group of people do.” Understanding consists in seeing “the best reason,” which is, for him, mathematical in essence. Using the mathematics of his day, he makes a stab in the Timaeus at offering such best reasons, though fully cognizant that better mathematics, and so better reasons, most probably lie in the future. Plato confides that he’ll be happy to be trumped by the superior reasons offered by thinkers of the future mathematics—why else did he gather the best mathematicians of his day to his Academy?—describing their “victory” as that of his friends and not his enemies (Timaeus 54a). And again we remember how Socrates is set aside in the Sophist and the Statesman so that younger thinkers may carry the process forward.
But then is the good life to be attained only by mathematical physicists? (I can imagine certain philosophy-jeerers perceptibly warming to Plato.) Is that “small group of people” so very exclusive? Not quite. Any of us who allow our circumscribed earthly existence to be opened up to the vast and beautiful reaches of all that is not ourselves—another word for which is “reality”—is among the small group of people Plato has in mind. The means for opening to the infinite doesn’t only come in the form of pursuing—or appreciating—mathematical physics, not even for Plato. He mentions, for example, music as holding the power to strengthen our affinity with the True-the Beautiful-the Good and so ethically reforming us. “And harmony, whose movements are akin to the orbits within our souls, is a gift of the Muses, if our dealings with them are guided by understanding, not for irrational pleasure, for which people nowadays seem to make use of it, but to serve as an ally in the fight to bring order in any orbit in our souls that has become unharmonized, and make it concordant with itself. Rhythm, too, has likewise been given to us by Muses for the same purpose, to assist us. For with most of us our condition is such that we have lost all sense of measure, and are lacking in grace” (Timaeus 47d–e).
Beautiful language, too, he says in the Timaeus, can carry us out of ourselves, providing the arrangements of words that, echoing with the harmonies of music, echo with the harmonies of the infinite (47c–d). This homage, brief as it is, to the transcendent powers of musical language offers the way for poetry to find its way back into Plato’s city of reason, a re-entry for which Plato confessed himself hopeful (Republic 607d). It’s not irrelevant that Percy Bysshe Shelley produced a stunning translation of the
Symposium, nor that his friend, John Keats, would compose the immortal lines identifying beauty and truth, nor that many poets should have felt themselves directly addressed by Plato. Poetry that brings us in contact with the vastness beyond us—cracking us open to it and letting infinity seep in to expand our finitude in knowledge and in love—receives the Platonic seal of approval. Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can “infinitize” us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the “small group of people.”
We can read into this passage an explanation for why Plato wrote as he did, lavishing his own soaring literary talents on the philosophical writings he left for us, however deep his misgivings concerning the linguistic enchantments that can override language’s all-important role, which is to state the truth. Beauty, for Plato, always has a leading cognitive role in guiding us to the truth and in allowing the truth to work us over; and philosophy, in trying to impose the beauty of the infinite on our being, should therefore strive to be as beautiful as it can. And so it was that Plato wrote the works of art he did, allowing the poet in him to escape and soar. (But to a human-oriented art, no matter how great, that wrings the pity and the terror from our incurable finitude, Plato can’t be reconciled.)
But what of Socrates’ own possibilities for having been “infinitized”? Did he have what, according to Plato, it took? There’s no indication that he was on fire with the beauty of mathematics or music or cosmology. And he certainly wasn’t a poet. At one point in the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates explain—lots of people are asking, reports Cebes—why he’s suddenly writing poetry in jail, setting the fables of Aesop to verse. Socrates explains how he’s had, throughout his life, a recurring dream in which he was enjoined to “practice and cultivate the arts.” He’d assumed that the dream was just encouraging him to keep on doing what he was doing, namely practicing the art of philosophy, but now that his life is about to end he’s been worried that maybe the dream was exhorting him to “practice this popular art … and compose poetry. I thought it safer not to leave here until I had satisfied my conscience by writing poems in obedience to the dream,” (60e–61b).
Now who knows whether Socrates actually undertook what sounds like a pretty lame attempt at becoming a poet in the last month of his life? I’m the mother of a professional poet, and I know what goes into the making of such a creature. You might as well try to become a mathematician or a cosmologist in the last thirty days of your life. And Plato, in whom the wings of a poet guide the flight of the philosopher, would have known this as well as anybody.
So Socrates was no poet, either. And yet, he did undeniably belong, in Plato’s eyes, to “the small group of people” whose lives throw them open to the infinite, with thoughts that, no matter how tethered to a mortal being they are, can’t “fail to be immortal, he can in no way fail to achieve this: constantly caring for his divine part as he does, keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him, he must indeed be supremely happy.” That was the picture that Socrates presented, not only to Plato but also to many of his contemporaries. He presented a picture of a man who, though constantly confessing his own ignorance, yet seemed to have come by a mysterious knowledge of how to live. The way in which Socrates combined his godlike certainty with his human confusion was a paradox that held great power. Socrates stood before Plato, wreathed in implications.
And nothing more powerfully convinced Plato of the implicative power of Socrates than the uncompromising stance he took in the summer of 399 on behalf of the philosophical project. It was that stance that had made the Athenian jury draw the conclusion: Socrates must die.
Socrates had always been a performer, and he might well have put on the performance of a lifetime on that day. We’d be naive to think that Plato, in the Apology, recorded that performance as a journalist might. Still, even if what we’re getting from the Apology is what Socrates’ stance had meant to Plato, then that’s more than enough. Socrates’ performance that day convinced Plato that Socrates would continue to perform for as long as there are people who care about philosophy. As far as Plato was concerned, Socrates had been infinitized.
WHAT WOULD ACHILLES DO?
We see him in all his maddening glory, making a fool of the obscure young poet Meletus, whom he effortlessly reduces to absurdity, using the dialectical tactic he’s perfected throughout his life.
Yes, Meletus confirms, Socrates is guilty of atheism, that is, of believing in no gods; and yes, Meletus also confirms, Socrates is guilty of introducing new gods, unrecognized by the state. So he believes in no gods while at the same time he believes in the gods. Socrates likens the blatant inconsistency to playing like a child (27a).
And yes, Meletus responds, everybody in Athens, every last voting citizen, has a salubrious influence on the youth of the city, and, yes, it is only Socrates who harms them, a situation so preposterous that Socrates mocks it as “a singular dispensation of fortune for our young people” (25b).
Meletus is dispatched so easily by Socrates because, says Socrates, he is not sincere in the matters he professes to care about; he demonstrates this insincerity by his failure to think through the implications of his statements. “You see, Meletus, that you are tongue-tied and cannot answer. Do you not feel that this is discreditable, and a sufficient proof in itself of what I said, that you have no interest in the subject?”
In other words, Socrates is accusing Meletus, unknown poet, of indeed being an artist: a bullshit-artist.
The term “bullshit” has been usefully incorporated into polite philosophical parlance through the work of the contemporary American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who published a little philosophical tract called On Bullshit in 2005. The work had first been published as an article in a scholarly journal, Raritan, in which form I had been assigning it for years to my students in Introduction to Philosophy, hoping to disabuse them at the onset of the expectations with which many entered the class. The essay was then republished in a collection of Frankfurt’s called The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Finally, it was republished as its own little book, in which, its third incarnation, it achieved a surprising state of bestsellerdom, the somewhat bemused philosopher even making an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Frankfurt’s book opens with this observation: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Frankfurt went on to offer a theory of bullshit, homing in on its essential features with the analytic precision for which Anglo-American philosophy is justifiably celebrated.
Bullshit must be pried apart from related concepts, such as humbug and, most importantly, lying. Both liars and bullshitters have a problematic relationship to the truth. Both liars and bullshitters misrepresent their relationship to the truth, but there are essential differences between them. A liar may—because he himself is confused about the truth—end up saying something true, but his intention is to say something that is not true. His intention is to induce a false belief in the person to whom he lies. A liar, therefore, is someone who is keeping track of the truth, or in any case trying to, for the purpose of deceiving.
A bullshitter, too, may end up saying something that is true. But unlike the liar, the bullshitter is not trying to keep track of what is true. The truth-conditions of his statements, their correspondence to the facts they purport to convey, are irrelevant to his motives for saying what he does. His motive for saying what he does is not to induce a false belief, as the liar’s is. He is not intent on deceiving with regard to the content of his assertion. His motive is to deceive with regard to his own bullshitting self, passing himself off as someone who cares about the truth when he does not.
Upon further clarification of the concept of bullshit, Frankfurt ventures the normative conclusion that bullshitting is more pernicious than lying. Acts of lyi
ng are, in the typical (non-pathological) liar, localized events; whereas a tendency to bullshit affects a person globally. Frankfurt closes his essay with this judgment:
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to.… The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Surveying the history of Western philosophy, the impression is that not all philosophers have shared Frankfurt’s moral repugnance to bullshit. But it is undeniable that many have, and Socrates was one. In fact, it is surprising that it has taken philosophers so long to get around to analyzing the concept, given that the offended reaction to bullshit helped to fertilize the original grounds for the field. Socrates, as he comes across in the Apology, would have loved Frankfurt’s essay, right down to the normative conclusion that bullshit is a greater offense to truth than lies are.
He would also have assented to the essay’s opening statement. One can well imagine Socrates turning to the assembled crowd on that summer’s day in 399 and declaring, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” That would have been exactly in the spirit of Socrates’ performance at his trial, as he went out of his way to offend Athenian normative sensibilities, a large part of which was bound up in its sense of exceptionalism. It had been Pericles’ genius to strengthen and spread the Athenian sense of themselves as collectively extraordinary. Socrates seemed intent on getting in a last-ditch effort at undermining such a sense.
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