The Phaedo seems to stand out within the Platonic corpus for its sustained and impassioned attack on the ills of embodied life and for its endorsement of asceticism. Several recent scholars have sought to temper the Phaedo’s otherworldliness, whether through novel readings of the arguments or by distancing Plato from the conclusions reached within the dialogue.[1] In his comprehensive new study (soon out in paperback), Ebrey takes a different tack and argues that “Socrates’ views in the Phaedo are every bit as radical as they initially seem—perhaps even more so” (2). Ebrey is mostly silent on the question of Plato’s relationship to those views, neither rejecting nor endorsing the “mouthpiece” theory; but he readily accepts that the character Socrates holds the views he defends in the dialogue, and he gives no reason to doubt that Plato at least took them very seriously. Wherever one stands on these issues, Ebrey’s book is an outstanding work of scholarship and a major contribution to our understanding of the Phaedo. Through detailed argument analysis, careful attention to the dialogue’s form and structure, and illuminating treatment of its intellectual contexts, Ebrey provides a reading that is impressively coherent and highly plausible.
The book is densely argued, but Ebrey helps the reader along with frequent signposting, recaps, and warnings when the discussion is about to get deep in the philological weeds. The prose is unfailingly clear.[2] In what follows, I’ll highlight the main arguments from each of the twelve chapters and then raise a methodological point.
A brief introduction previews Ebrey’s key claims, including the thesis that the Phaedo has an “unfolding structure” (2): certain dogmatic-sounding claims made earlier in the dialogue (e.g., about the forms) are only expounded and defended later on. So we need to read the dialogue holistically to understand any particular argument. Chapter 1 discusses Plato’s choice of characters, while suggesting that apparent differences between Socrates’ portrayal in the Phaedo and in the so-called “early” dialogues are explained by the diversity of his interlocutors. The Phaedo uniquely shows Socrates in conversation with friends who are already committed to philosophy and who acknowledge their own ignorance. Socrates discusses his own views without claiming to know they are correct. His main interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, have Orphic and Pythagorean sympathies (but not settled convictions); Socrates takes up ideas from these traditions and interprets them in ways that cohere with his basic commitments. Throughout the book, Ebrey makes a compelling case for continuity between the Phaedo’s Socrates and the figure we meet elsewhere in Plato.
Chapter 2 turns to the Phaedo’s relation to tragedy. Ebrey reads the dialogue as an “alternative” to tragedy: Plato adopts formal elements from the genre while rejecting defining features of its content (e.g., grief, lamenting, and the destructive power of tuchê), to tell “a new sort of story of how a hero faces death” (28). At 64a, Socrates tells his friends it would be absurd for him to resent his imminent execution when “the sole pursuit of those who correctly engage in philosophy is dying and being dead.”[3] Chapter 3 elucidates this startling claim and Socrates’ initial defense of it. According to Ebrey, Socrates uses “being dead” in a technical sense: a person is truly dead only when his soul becomes “itself through itself” (αὐτὴ καθ’ αὑτήν), i.e., when it is purified of all attachment to the body and its desires. The soul desires wisdom (phronêsis), which in the Phaedo is identical to the good (83). Ordinary death is necessary but not sufficient for truly dying and becoming maximally wise. By purifying himself of bodily affections as far as possible, the philosopher gets closer to wisdom and can hope to acquire it in the afterlife. The virtues of courage (andreia) and temperance (sôphrosunê) are not identical to wisdom—as Socrates seems to hold in other dialogues—but result from wisdom and also contribute to it, by purifying the soul of desires for things other than wisdom (85).
As Cebes observes, Socrates’ defense simply assumes what many people doubt—that the soul survives the death of the human being, and in such a state that it can possess wisdom. The rest of the dialogue is largely an extended investigation into whether this is “likely” (εἰκός, 70b7) to be so. Chapters 4–6 analyze Cebes’ challenge and Socrates’ first three arguments about the fate of the soul after death (and before birth). Ebrey brings fresh insights to the “cyclical”, “recollecting”, and “kinship” arguments, showing how each contributes something important to Socrates’ account. Chapter 5 interprets “recollecting” (anamnêsis) as an extended process that begins with perception of ordinary objects and, when completed, ends in knowledge of the relevant form, which is the standard by which the sensible object is judged. Though few complete the process, and so can be said to have recollected, everyone is in the process of recollecting when their perception of an ordinary object brings the relevant form to mind. Chapter 6 argues that the soul, on Socrates’ account, is akin to but does not belong to the class of the unseen, which includes the forms and the gods. This is important for the Phaedo’s ethics, because it means the soul can become more or less like its divine kin. It is in the kinship argument, too, that Socrates explains a basic fact about forms as opposed to ordinary objects: forms have all their features “through” (kata) themselves, which is to say that they lack internal complexity and so are incomposite and indestructible. Likewise, wisdom “is the state of the soul where it has become itself kata itself and at rest, since it is grasping the unseen” (157).
Chapter 7 focuses on a four-page stretch (80d–84b) where Socrates returns to his defense armed with new resources from the kinship argument. The passage is key for interpreting Socrates’ asceticism. On Ebrey’s reading, Socrates views the body as hostile to a person’s genuine interests: “True courage … is primarily a struggle within the soul against our true enemies, bodily affections” (178). It does not follow that we should fetishize this struggle or prefer pains to pleasures, but we ought to avoid bodily desires as far as possible or risk being bewitched by them. Chapter 8 covers Simmias’ soul-as-harmonia objection and Socrates’ counter-arguments, and interprets “misology” as the result of repeatedly putting one’s trust in logoi and losing that trust. In his “autobiography” (95e–102a), the focus of Chapter 9, Socrates recalls his own youthful disillusionment with Anaxagoras’ cosmology and the approach to inquiry he developed in response. Ebrey draws on the Hippocratic corpus to illuminate both Socrates’ precise causal/explanatory language and his distinctive use of “hypotheses”. Contrary to many interpreters, Ebrey argues that Socrates is not interested specifically in teleological causes (aitiai) or suggesting that all genuine causes must be related to the good (223). He interprets Socrates’ “method of hypothesis” as a non-dogmatic answer to the threat of misology: by treating forms as hypotheses, Socrates and his friends can evaluate what they would be committed to were forms to exist, without trusting them too quickly and then feeling betrayed should the theory fail.
Chapter 10 analyzes Cebes’ “cloakmaker” objection and Socrates’ “final” argument about the fate of the soul (the only one of the four that argues for the soul’s immortality). Taking the text out of order allows Ebrey to explain how Socrates addresses Cebes’ specific concern that the soul’s life-imparting activity wears it down over successive incarnations. Especially helpful is the distinction drawn between forms proper (heat itself), immanent forms (the heat in this burning log), and what Ebrey calls “bringers” of the immanent forms (the fire in this log), whose presence in a sensible thing entails that the immanent form also will be present (although the form is “responsible” (aition) for the sensible thing’s having the feature it does). Since the soul is a “bringer” of life to bodies, its life-bringing activity cannot cause it to lose life.
Chapter 11’s discussion of Socrates’ eschatological and cosmological account is perhaps the most innovative part of the book. The usual label “myth” is misleading, Ebrey shows, since Socrates gives the discrete stages of his account different epistemic statuses, reserving the term muthos for his description of the earth’s “true” surface and the underworld. Ebrey denies that Socrates offers a cosmic teleology: evils in our world are due to elemental flux, which in turn is caused by the earth’s lack of a foundation at its center; impure souls are punished in the underworld, but apparently through natural necessity rather than divine, beneficial justice (292–94).
Chapter 12 offers a fresh take on the death scene. When Crito asks Socrates what they can do for him after he has gone, he replies: “If you take care of yourselves, whatever you do will be a favor to me and mine, and to yourself” (115b5–7). For Ebrey, the point of this exchange is to reaffirm Socrates’ commitment to justice: “purifying one’s soul and contemplating will not come at the expense of others” (301). More speculatively, Ebrey proposes that Socrates’ enigmatic last words be read as a deathbed prophecy: through a divine insight, Socrates confirms his hope that the soul is immortal and that philosophers acquire wisdom and live happily after death.[4] So he again urges his friends not to be careless (μὴ ἀμελήσητε, 118a8). As for why he shows gratitude to Asclepius in particular, Ebrey accepts several possibilities but inclines toward the Nietzschean reading that Socrates regards embodied life (not life per se) as a disease. Socrates’ last words thus reinforce his uncompromising asceticism.
The signal achievement of Ebrey’s book, in my view, is how fully it reveals the subtleties and cohesiveness of the Phaedo’s complex of arguments—what they do and do not presuppose, how they build upon each other, and the specific ways Socrates answers his friends’ doubts and curiosities. Overall, I found the exegetical approach refreshing: Ebrey reads the text sympathetically, while refusing to let “our” moral and metaphysical assumptions constrain his analyses. He allows that Plato may have been attracted to positions that most modern readers will find implausible. Still, as persuaded as I was by Ebrey’s reconstructions, I sometimes wondered what the Phaedo’s audience was really supposed to make of the arguments. Ebrey mostly avoids raising objections that are not introduced by the characters themselves; occasionally he deflects a challenge by pointing out that Socrates aims to produce “conviction” (pistis) in his friends, not unshakeable knowledge (see 97, on the cyclical argument; 135, on the kinship argument). But it is a feature of Plato’s dialogues, as of all mimetic art, that the thoughts and intentions represented within a work do not determine the meaning of the text as a whole. If the characters accept an argument that seems too quick, it is an open question whether Plato’s ideal reader was meant to recognize the flaw, and what interpretive consequences should follow. Ebrey does point out that Socrates himself, at the end of the final argument (107b), registers the need to examine the hypotheses more fully—and he identifies the form of life as a candidate for further scrutiny (268). He also raises doubts about the category of “bringers” (270). He does not, however, seem to treat such doubts as relevant to his interpretive task. It is an interesting and difficult question to what extent they should be.
Ebrey’s book explains so much that it seems greedy to ask for more. But it arguably gives too little importance to the Phaedo’s tensions and fissures. I’ll conclude with an example. Some readers perceive a tension between the confident optimism with which Socrates rests his case and the pathos of the death scene, as his friends compare themselves to orphaned children and burst into tears. Here is Bernard Williams:
[T]he end of the Phaedo is, hardly surprisingly, run through with a deep sorrow, and we are not supposed to think that Socrates’ friends are grieving simply because they have not been convinced by the arguments for immortality. It registers, rather, that, even given immortality and the world of Forms, this world and its friendships are of real value, and that its losses are at some level as bad as they seem.[5]
Ebrey sees things differently. The grief of Socrates’ friends—like the empathy of the reader—shows only that they are far from having separated themselves from bodily concerns, which include their attachment to embodied individuals. They might think they are suffering a genuine loss, but they are mistaken: “Socrates’ companions do not need him; they need philosophy, which they will still have after he departs” (193). If that is the point Plato wanted to make, I am not sure the Phaedo brings it off: the more heroic and inimitable Socrates the man is portrayed to be (see Phaedo’s final assessment at 118a), the more justifiable it is for his friends to feel bereft of him. It is not only wisdom and beauty and justice that they love, but the living and breathing Socrates. Along with all the astonishing theoretical work it does, the Phaedo makes vivid the reasons for that love.[6]
Notes
[1] See, e.g., Chapter 2 of Coleen P. Zoller, Plato and the Body: Reconsidering Socratic Asceticism (Albany, 2018) (BMCR 2019.02.29) and Chapter 6 of Sandra Peterson, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato (Cambridge, 2011) (BMCR 2011.12.54).
[2] I spotted about sixty typos, none significant.
[3] Ebrey quotes (with modifications) the translation in David Sedley and Alex Long, Plato: Meno and Phaedo (Cambridge, 2010).
[4] An objection is that Socrates’ prophecy in the Apology (39c–d), like the Iliadic prophecies it echoes, is in the future tense.
[5] “Plato: The Invention of Philosophy,” in The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Princeton, 2006), 175.
[6] I am grateful to Harry Malone for extensive discussions of Ebrey’s book while preparing this review.