Notes on Plato’s Phaedo 70a - 77e

I. Introduction

Socrates had said at 61c and 63b-c that a philosopher should be willing to accept his or her death, without resentment and with good hope. His young Pythagorean friends, Simmias and Cebes, asked him to explain and argue for that claim. From 63e to 69e, Socrates argued that if one accepts that

(a) death is the separation of body from soul and of soul from body, and

(b) what the philosopher seeks is a kind of knowledge that is not apprehended by the five senses (and this kind of knowledge can be hindered or confused by one’s body and its effects),

then

only in death, if at all, will the philosopher attain the knowledge that he or she seeks (67a).¹ This conclusion depended in part on the assumption (65a and 66a) that a person is his or her soul (and not the complex of soul and body). For if a person is taken to be the complex of soul and body, the person would not be him- or herself when soul and body separate, so the philosopher would not be around after his or her death.

II. 70a-72e: an argument about opposites

Cebes points out that the chance to pursue knowledge without hindrance from one’s body will only be available to the philosopher if in fact the soul continues to exist and function after it has become separated from the body. That is, if the soul were to dissolve after separating from body, it would not exist to pursue knowledge. If the soul were to continue to exist but in a weakened or diminished state, it would not be able to pursue knowledge, or perhaps would not be conscious.²

Socrates produces an argument that purports to show that what is living must come from what is dead. Thus a living creature would come from a dead one, by reincarnation. This seems to require (at least, Cebes seems to accept that it requires) that a soul persists after its separation from one body, so that it can then make a new body a living creature.

The argument has a number of flaws. These flaws are, I suggest, deliberate on Plato’s part, and probably intended as deliberate on the part of the character Socrates. The flaws as well as the valid reasoning pose questions for the reader to consider, and also reveal issues that those who engage in philosophy in the manner of Socrates’ friends will miss. More on this appears below, and will emerge throughout our study of the dialogue.

A. Socrates first asks Cebes whether all things that come to be and have opposites come to be from their opposites (70e). Note that here Socrates is not speaking of all things, and he’s not speaking of things that come to be but do not have opposites, but only of things that come to be and have opposites.

Socrates gives examples that are intended to illustrate this:³ 

• If something comes to be larger than it was, it must have been smaller before.
• If something comes to be smaller than it was, it must have been larger before.
• If something becomes weaker, it must have been stronger.
• If something becomes swifter, it must have been slower.
• If something becomes worse, it must have been better.
• If something becomes more just, it must have been more unjust.

From these examples, Cebes agrees that all things come to be from their opposites.

One problem with this conclusion is that, as we’ve noted above, Socrates was not originally talking about all things; he has not shown that all things come to be. This is important because Socrates is going to argue later that certain things, such as soul, do not come to be.

Socrates also has not shown that all things that come to be come to be from their opposites, or even that all things have opposites. (Cebes, as a Pythagorean, might miss this, because he might think he knows how opposites work, or might think that all things exemplify opposites in some way.)

Another problem is that even if we consider only things that come to be and that have opposites, Socrates has not shown that all of those things come to be from their opposites. He has only shown that if we talk of things becoming more one way or another, we say they must have gotten more that way after being less that way; if we talk of things becoming less one way or another, we say they must have gotten less that way after being more that way.

That is, if we say that something comes to be largER than it was, we imply that at one time it was smallER than it is now. But if we say that something came to be large, or that a large thing came to be, it may or may not be true that the thing used to be small. Perhaps it was always large (maybe more so or less so, but still large). Or perhaps it did not exist before, and as soon as it came into being it was large.

B. Socrates now asks Cebes to identify the processes by which things come to be opposite - for example, increase and decrease (or growing and shrinking) for things coming to be larger or smaller. In the case of the opposite of dying, there does not seem to be a conventional name, and Socrates proposes that they “supply” or “provide” one (71e). In other words, he is suggesting making up a name for a process that he has deduced should go on; and Cebes agrees.

Perhaps that would make more sense if the deduction were more solid. But in fact it rests on some unsupported and unwarranted assumptions. We’ve already identified some of them in II.A. Another one is that waking always comes to be from sleeping, and vice versa. We don’t know that that is true, and in fact both now and in ancient Greece it was thought not to be true: at a certain stage of development, babies in the womb begin to undergo cycles of movement and rest. It’s widely thought that they go through sleep periods and waking periods at this point. Before that, they are not sufficiently developed to do this. Thus either their entry into these cycles is first sleep or first waking, and what preceded it was neither sleep nor wakefulness. (If you think babies don’t sleep or wake until they are born, then you would say that their first state is either wakefulness or sleep, and that for this baby there was neither sleeping nor waking before it.) Similarly, a person who dies in his or her sleep has a period of sleep that does not end in waking; one who dies during a waking period does not then enter a sleeping period.⁴

III. Recollection (anamnesis), 73a-77e
A. Socrates’ friends accept the argument that being alive must come from being dead, and Cebes notes that this argument fits well with another account that Socrates sometimes mentions, namely the account of learning as recollection. Several dialogues have the character of Socrates say that learning during human embodied life is recollection.

The relationship between the thesis that learning is recollection and the argument that the soul persists after separation from body is that (according to Socrates’ arguments) the knowledge that one recollects during bodily life was originally obtained when one’s soul was separate from one’s body. Each time one’s soul is reincarnated into a body, it forgets this knowledge, and if one wants to get in touch with this knowledge while in a body, one has to recollect it by a certain kind of learning process (76c).⁵

The English word ‘recollection’ is being used in your text to translate the Greek anamnesis. The root of the word is mne-, denoting memory or remembering (Mnemosune is the goddess of memory; a mnemonic device is a technique for remembering). Amne- adds the negative a-, so words in amne- refer to forgetting (English borrows the word ‘amnesia’ from Greek). Anamnesis adds another negative a-, so it means something like “un-forgetting” or “de-forgetting,” the opposite of forgetting. So regathering one’s memories might be thought of as re-collecting, recollection.

B. In this dialogue, Cebes gives one account of how recollection works and why learning is recollection, and Socrates gives another. Note that what Socrates says about how people recollect is not the process he uses to get Simmias to learn; what Socrates does is more like what Cebes describes. None of his friends remark on this, but it is significant: The process Socrates describes does not necessarily involve reasoning on the part of the learner, but the process Cebes describes does. The process Socrates uses in his demonstration in fact involves the kind of questions and reasoning Cebes mentions. And when Simmias tries to say where his learning came from, he doesn’t mention reasoning. In fact, Socrates’ friends pay no attention to the role of reasoning until Socrates draws attention to it from 96-102; and even then, they would rather hear comforting or exciting ideas than reason about them. They would rather accept a set of ideas from their teachers than investigate their fundamental assumptions. They would rather hear lots of new ideas, and follow lots of paths for short distances than follow out a line of questions thoroughly.

    1. Specifically, Cebes’ description of the “evidence” that learning is recollection is that when people are questioned in an appropriate way, they always give the right answers (even if they did not initially know the right answers and had not learned the right answers earlier). They will also be able, if questioned in a certain way, to explain or show why their answers are correct (73a-b; and as your text notes, Socrates seems to demonstrate exactly this process of questioning at Meno 81ff.).⁶

    2. Socrates then gives an alternate version of the “evidence” that learning is recollection, a version he does not give elsewhere: He says that when one senses or thinks of one thing, one may be reminded of another quite different thing, and this is also “recollecting” the second thing (73c-d; note that there is no mention of questioning here, and no mention of a “right” answer or an explanation).

C. Socrates now tries to show Simmias that learning is recollection of things one does not directly sense, and manages to get Simmias to conclude that the knowledge one recollects must have been acquired by the soul when the soul was not in a body:

Socrates returns to the idea that philosophers seek knowledge about things such as “the beautiful itself” (that which all beautiful things have in common that makes them beautiful), “the just itself” (that which all just things have in common that makes them just), “the equal itself” (that which all equal things, or equal pairs or groups, have in common that makes them equal: equalness, or equality) – 74a, 75c, etc. (and compare the idea of the pious itself, Euthyphro 5d, 6e). These are not perceived through the five senses – not only does one not see or hear justice, for example, but one does not see equality with one’s  eyes. One sees objects and if one has the notion of equality, one can measure the objects to see whether they are equal. One can even determine that two things are of equal width if they look to be of different widths. But children who have not learned the idea of equality can see the same objects we do and not grasp that they are equal.

How, then, do we come to grasp what it is to be equal, what makes things equal, “the equal itself”? Socrates suggests that seeing objects that are roughly equal “reminds” us of the equal itself, just as seeing a picture of Simmias “reminds” us of Simmias, or of Cebes (Simmias’ close friend), 74c-d. In fact, the reminding or recollecting process, as Socrates portrays it to Simmias, is quite involuntary on our part. The roughly equal objects that we sense “strive” toward the equal itself (75b) and our sense perceptions of these objects “make” us realize that the objects are striving toward the equal itself (also 75b).

Let us note that this view of learning seems to conflict with the account given at 66-69. In that earlier passage, Socrates had proposed, and Simmias agreed, that the body and senses are nothing but a hindrance in the search for knowledge. The had portrayed body and senses as an obstacle that is never helpful. But here, at 73-77, they say that the senses help one learn, and are not always a hindrance. In fact, at 73-77, the senses are a necessary tool in the learning process.

Let us also note that the soul seems passive in the account Socrates and Simmias give at 73-77; it isn’t asking questions or doing any research or reasoning. It’s just reacting to sense perceptions of objects that are striving toward some ideal. (How inanimate objects such as sticks can “strive” is never discussed.)

With this picture in place, a picture of a largely passive soul that is occasionally reminded of things, Socrates asks when the soul could have initially gained the knowledge of the equal itself, the just itself, etc. (the knowledge that it is reminded of in recollection). Simmias agrees that it did not obtain this knowledge during bodily life, as we needed to have it in place before all sense perceptions began, and we have no experience of ourselves or anyone else gaining it by sense perception during bodily life (75d-e, 76c). Therefore, Simmias says, we must have acquired this knowledge before birth into a body, and then forgotten it upon being born into a body (76c-d). (Presumably, all humans have this ability to recollect, so the recollectable knowledge must be in our souls prior to our first human incarnation at least.)

Note that Socrates and Simmias have overlooked some possibilities as to when we could have gained knowledge of the equal itself, the good itself, etc.:
    - we might not now have knowledge of this kind at all, but only have an approximation developed by reasoning, imagining, hypothesizing, and experimentation;
    - knowledge of this kind may not exist, so what we have is some sort of generalizations and rules of thumb that are useful, and which we developed by reasoning, guesswork, trial and error;
    - if we do have knowledge of this kind, we could have developed it by reasoning, imagining, hypothesizing, and experimentation.

I suggest that Plato is showing us Simmias’ lack of training in reasoning, and his ignorance of its role, its proper use, and its limitations.

There is another problem here: Socrates refers repeatedly to the soul’s “acquiring” knowledge or “learning” while separated from a body (75d-76d). But how does it learn while separated? It can’t be by recollection; that requires a body. And why does the soul need to acquire knowledge in order to have it – why does Socrates not say that the knowledge is “built in”? In fact, the notion that it must acquire knowledge sets up the possibility that it might only get knowledge after a few incarnations, so that there would be people who would not be able to recollect correctly because their souls did not have the right knowledge. This possibility is ignored in the dialogue.

Socrates tries to sum up the argument at 76d-77a by saying that if the beautiful itself, the good itself, the just itself etc. exist, then our soul must exist before birth (otherwise we would not be able to compare sensed things to them); that the beautiful itself etc. and souls that exist before association with bodies have “equal necessity” of existing (this doesn’t really follow). This draws our attention to the fact that no one in the dialogue has attempted to establish that the beautiful itself, the good itself, etc. really do exist.

But that’s no problem for Simmias. He just assumes that the beautiful itself, etc. do exist; “Nothing is so evident to me personally” (77a). And from that he is happy to conclude that the soul exists in between its associations with bodies.

D. At 77b, both Simmias and Cebes note that this is not enough to establish that a soul will survive more than a few associations with bodies, so that perhaps Socrates’ soul has gone through several bodies but will disintegrate after leaving its current body.

Simmias and Cebes ask Socrates to show them that his soul will survive, so that they can feel comforted and not fear death (their own or Socrates’). This is significant because it is one of several reminders that Simmias and Cebes want to hear arguments that will make them feel better. One thing the dialogue prompts one to consider, then, is whether there are other goals for philosophical argument, whether some of these goals might at times conflict with the goal of feeling reassured, whether and when being reassured is a suitable goal, and so on.