The hidden dharma of Phaedo

Joshua

Here I've supplied an entire subchapter from Anthony Kenny's An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy not to facilitate your Buddhist journey nor to elucidate any unclear topics as would otherwise be sought on these forums, but rather to show you that a western mind 2,400 years in the past, when left to his own enquiries may reach conclusions not altogether different from a Buddhist's. The Greeks had no real (at least recorded) tradition of soul transmigration (or metempsychosis as they called it) outside of slipshod transmigration beliefs held by at least Pythagoras and a deranged Empedocles, and in fact, held no legitimate metaphysical beliefs whatsoever apart from their native mythos up until this point; and whether this account is to be taken as strictly Socratic or quasi-Platonic is no matter, only the date matters which is 360 BCE.

The dialogue with which Plato concludes his account of Socrates’ last days is
called the Phaedo, after the name of the narrator, a citizen of Parmenides’ city of
Elea, who claims, with his friends Simmias and Cebes, to have been present with Socrates at his death. The drama begins as news arrives that the sacred ship has
returned from Delos, which brings to an end the stay of execution. Socrates’
chains are removed, and he is allowed a final visit from his weeping wife Xanthippe
with their youngest child in her arms. After she leaves, the group turns to a
discussion of death and immortality.
A true philosopher, Socrates maintains, will have no fear of death; but he will not
take his own life, either, even when dying seems preferable to going on living. We
are God’s cattle, and we should not take ourselves off without a summons from
God. Why, then, ask Simmias and Cebes, is Socrates so ready to go to his death?
In response Socrates takes as his starting point the conception of a human
being as a soul imprisoned in a body. True philosophers care little for bodily
pleasures such as food and drink and sex, and they find the body a hindrance
rather than a help in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. ‘Thought is best when
the mind is gathered into itself, and none of these things trouble it – neither
sounds nor sights nor pain, nor again any pleasure – when it takes leave of the
body and has as little as possible to do with it.’ So philosophers in their pursuit of
truth continually try to keep their souls detached from their bodies. But death is
the full separation of soul from body: hence, a true philosopher has, all life long,
been in effect seeking and craving after death.
Hunger and disease and lust and fear obstruct the study of philosophy. The
body is to blame for faction and war, because the body’s demands need money
for their satisfaction, and all wars are caused by the love of money. Even in
peacetime the body is a source of endless turmoil and confusion. ‘If we would
have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body – the soul by itself
must behold things by themselves: and then we shall attain that which we desire,
and of which we say that we are lovers – wisdom; not while we live but, as the
argument shows, only after death.’ A true lover of wisdom, therefore, will depart
this life with joy.
So far, it is fair to say, Socrates has been preaching rather than arguing. Cebes
brings him up short by saying that most people will reject the premiss that the
soul can survive the body. They believe rather that on the day of death the soul
comes to an end, vanishing into nothingness like a puff of smoke. ‘Surely it
requires a great deal of proof to show that when a man is dead his soul yet exists,
and has any strength or intelligence.’ So Socrates proceeds to offer a set of proofs
of immortality.
First, there is the argument from opposites. If two things are opposites, each of
them comes into being from the other. If someone goes to sleep, she must have
been awake. If someone wakes up, he must have been asleep. Again, if A becomes
greater than B, then A must have been less that B. If A becomes better than B,
then A must have been worse than B. Thus, these opposites, greater and less, plus
better and worse, just like sleeping and waking, come into being from each other.
But death and life are opposites, and the same must hold true here also. Those
who die, obviously enough, are those who have been living; should we not
conclude that dying in its turn is followed by living? Since life after death is not
visible, we must conclude that souls live in another world below, perhaps to
return to earth in some latter day.
The second argument sets out to prove the existence of a non-embodied soul
not after, but before, its life in the body. The proof proceeds in two steps: first,
Socrates seeks to show that knowledge is recollection; second, he urges that
recollection involves pre-existence.
The first step in the argument goes like this. We constantly see things which
are more or less equal in size. But we never see two stones or blocks of wood or
other material things which are absolutely equal to each other. Hence, our idea of
absolute equality cannot be derived from experience. The approximately equal
things we see merely remind us of absolute equality, in the way that a portrait
may remind us of an absent lover.
The second step is this. If we are reminded of something, we must have been
acquainted with it beforehand. So if we are reminded of absolute equality, we
must have previously encountered it. But we did not do so in our present life
with our ordinary senses of sight and touch. So we must have done so, by pure
intellect, in a previous life before we were born – unless, improbably, we imagine
that the knowledge of equality was infused into us at the moment of our birth. If
the argument works for the idea of absolute equality, it works equally for other
similar ideas, such as absolute goodness and absolute beauty.
Socrates admits that this second argument, even if successful in proving that
the soul exists before birth, will not show its survival after death unless it is
reinforced by the first argument. So he offers a third argument, based on the
concepts of dissolubility and indissolubility.
If something is able to dissolve and disintegrate, as the body does at death,
then it must be something composite and changeable. But the objects with which
the soul is concerned, such as absolute equality and beauty, are unchangeable,
unlike the beauties we see with the eyes of the body, which fade and decay. The
visible world is constantly changing; only what is invisible remains unaltered. The
invisible soul suffers change only when dragged, through the senses of the body,
into the world of flux.
Within that world, the soul staggers like a drunkard; but when it returns into
itself, it passes into the world of purity, eternity, and immortality. This is the
world in which it is at home. ‘The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and
immortal, and rational, and uniform, and indissoluble and unchangeable, and the
body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and irrational, and multiform,
and dissoluble, and changeable.’ Hence, Socrates concludes, the body is
liable to dissolution, while the soul is almost totally indissoluble. If even bodies,
when mummified in Egypt, can survive for many years, it must be totally improbable
that the soul dissolves and disappears at the moment of death.

Joshua

continued...

The soul of the true philosopher will depart to an invisible world of bliss. But
impure souls, who in life were nailed to the body by rivets of pleasure and pain,
and are still wedded to bodily concerns at the moment of death, will not become
totally immaterial, but will haunt the tomb as shadowy ghosts, until they enter
the prison of a new body, perhaps of a lascivious ass, or a vicious wolf, or at best,
a sociable and industrious bee.
Simmias now undermines the basis of Socrates’ argument by offering a different,
and subtle, conception of the soul. Consider, he says, a lyre made out of wood and strings. The lyre may be in tune or out of tune, depending on the
tension of the strings. A living human body may be compared to a lyre that is in
tune, and a dead body to a lyre out of tune. Suppose someone were to claim that,
while the strings and the wood were gross material composites, being in tune was
something which was invisible and incorporeal. Would it not be foolish to argue
that this attunement could survive the smashing of the lyre and the rending of its
strings? Of course; and we must conclude that when the strings of the body lose
their tone through injury or disease, the soul must perish like the tunefulness of
a broken lyre.
Cebes too still needs convincing that the soul is immortal, but his criticism of
Socrates is less radical than that of Simmias. He is prepared to agree that the soul
is more powerful than the body, and need not wear out when the body wears
out. In the normal course of life, the body suffers frequent wear and tear and
needs constant restoration by the soul. But may not the soul itself eventually
come to die in the body, just as a weaver, who has made and worn out many
coats in his lifetime, may die and be survived by the last of them? Even on the
hypothesis of transmigration, a soul might pass from body to body, and yet not
be imperishable but eventually meet its death. So, concludes Simmias, ‘he who is
confident about death can have but a foolish confidence, unless he is able to
prove that the soul is altogether immortal and imperishable’.
In response to Simmias, Socrates first falls back on the argument from recollection
which required the soul’s pre-existence. This is quite unintelligible if having
a soul is simply having one’s body in tune; a lyre has to exist before it can be
tuned. More importantly, being in tune admits of degrees: a lyre can be more or
less in tune. But souls do not admit of degrees; no soul can be more or less a soul
than another soul. One might say that a virtuous soul was a soul in harmony with
itself: but if so, it would have to be an attunement of an attunement. Again, it is
the tension of the strings which causes the lyre to be in tune, but in the human
case the relationship is the other way round: it is the soul which keeps the body
in order. Under this battery of arguments, Simmias admits defeat.
Before answering Cebes, Socrates offers a long narrative of his own intellectual
history, leading up to his acceptance of the existence of absolute ideas, such as
absolute beauty and absolute goodness. Only by sharing in beauty itself can
something be beautiful. The same goes for the tall and short: a tall man is tall
through tallness, and a short man is short through shortness. An individual may
grow or shrink, and indeed if he becomes taller he must have been shorter, as was
agreed earlier; but though he is first short and then tall, his shortness can never
become tallness, nor his tallness shortness. This is so even in the case of a person
like Simmias, who, as it happens, is taller than Socrates and shorter than Phaedo.
The relevance of these remarks to immortality takes some time to become clear.
Socrates goes on to make a distinction between what later philosophers would call
the contingent and necessary properties of things. Human beings may or may not be tall, but the number three cannot but be odd, and snow cannot but be cold: these
properties are necessary to them, and not just contingent. Now just as coldness
cannot turn into heat, so too snow, which is necessarily cold, must either retire
or perish at the approach of heat; it cannot remain and become hot snow.
Socrates generalizes: not only will opposites not receive opposites, but nothing
which necessarily brings with it an opposite will admit the opposite of what it
brings.
Now Socrates draws his moral. The soul brings life, just as snow brings cold.
But death is the opposite of life, so that the soul can no more admit death than
snow can admit heat. But what cannot admit death is immortal, and so the soul
is immortal. But there is a difference between the soul and snow: when heat
arrives, the snow simply perishes. But since what is immortal is also imperishable,
the soul, at the approach of death, does not perish, but retires to another world.
It is not at all clear how this is an answer to Cebes’ contention that the soul
might be able to survive one or more deaths without being everlasting and
imperishable. But in the dialogue Socrates’ conclusion that the soul is immortal
and imperishable and will exist in another world is greeted with acclamation, and
the audience settles down to listen to Socrates as he narrates a series of myths
about the soul’s journeys in the underworld.
The narration over, Crito asks Socrates whether he has any last wishes, and
how he should be buried. He is told to bear in mind the message of the dialogue:
they will be burying only Socrates’ body, not Socrates himself, who is to go to
the joys of the blessed. Socrates takes his last bath, and says farewell to the
women and children of his family. The gaoler arrives with the cup of the poison,
hemlock, which was given to condemned prisoners in Athens as the mode of their
execution. After a joke to the gaoler, Socrates drains the cup and composes
himself serenely for death as sensation gradually deserts his limbs. His last words
are puzzling: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius; will you remember to pay the
debt’. Aesculapius was the god of healing. Perhaps the words mean that the life
of the body is a disease, and death is its cure (see Plate 1).
The Phaedo is a masterpiece: it is one of the finest surviving pieces of Greek
prose, and even in translation it moves and haunts the reader. Two questions
arise: what does it tell us about Socrates? What does it tell us about the immortality
of the soul?
The narrative framework provided by Socrates’ imprisonment and death is
commonly accepted by scholars as authentic; and certainly it is Plato’s account
of these last hours which has held the imagination of writers and artists through
the centuries. But several of the speeches propounding the soul’s immortality are
couched in language more appropriate to Plato’s own philosophical system than
to the cross-examination techniques of the historic Socrates. The confidence in
survival expressed in the Phaedo is in sharp contrast with the agnosticism attributed
to Socrates in Plato’s own Apology.

Joshua

continued...

The arguments for immortality, cut out of the pattern of ancient myth into
which they are interwoven, are unlikely to convince a modern reader. But even in
antiquity, counterarguments would come quickly to mind. Is it true that opposites
always come from opposites? Did not Parmenides show that Being could not
come from Unbeing? And even where opposites come from opposites, must the
cycle continue for ever? Even if sleeping has to follow waking, may not one last
waking be followed by everlasting sleep? And however true it may be that the
soul cannot abide death, why must it retire elsewhere when the body dies, rather
than perish like the melted snow?
The most interesting topics of the dialogue are the argument from recollection,
and the criticism of the idea that the soul is an attunement of the body. Both of
these themes have a long history ahead of them. But the first will be best pursued
when we have examined its place in Plato’s own developed system, and the
second is best evaluated when we consider the account of the soul given by
Plato’s successor Aristotle.
In the works of philosophers through the ages, the name ‘Socrates’ occurs on
many a page. More often than not, however, it is not a reference to the Athenian
who drank the hemlock. It came into common use as a dummy name to be used
in the formalization of arguments; as in the syllogism:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Particularly in the Middle Ages the name was used daily by writers who knew
very little of the story told in the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. In this, as in more
solemn ways, the mortality and death of Socrates has echoed through the philosophical
literature of the West.

Jason

I've found quite a few parallels between ideas found in Plato's dialogues and the teachings of the Buddha that are recorded in the Pali Canon (e.g., see my "sharing in the form of dhamma").

thickpaper

I haven't read any Dialogues for twenty years, but I have reading through ancients Greek quotes (on a smartphone app!) and it blows my mind how close to Dharma they are. On happiness, self-knowledge, truth, kindness...

Id love to hear any other similarities....

Lest we not forget the most important two words in all of the ancient word: Know Thyself.

Maybe they had the internet?:p

taiyaki

Many centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates used to walk through the streets
and marketplaces of Athens, teaching his students. He would say to them, “You must
understand yourself! You must understand yourself! You must understand yourself.”
Then one day a student said, “Sir, you always say we must understand ourselves.
But do you understand yourself?”

“No, I don’t know myself,” Socrates replied. “But I understand this ‘don’t know.’” This
is very interesting teaching. Buddhist practice points at the same experience,
because most human beings pass through their lives without the slightest sense of
what they are.

So Choyge Zen teaches that by cutting off all thinking and returning to don’t know
mind, you already attain your true self. The great Korean Zen Master Ko Bong used
to teach, “If you attain don’t know, that is your original master.” This is the same as
Socrates’ famous teaching. “Teacher, do you understand yourself?” “No, but I
understand this don’t know.” Chogye Zen teaches in this way.

- Seung Sahn

Just thought you'd find this interesting. Nice read.

Joshua

Thank you all. I will read that blog Jason.

Martin Heidegger, a colleague of Husserl's (who himself was famous for his phenomenology which in absolutely brevity would be the practise of abstaining from any presuppositions and observing the appearances (phainomenona) of things as if in a deep, open-eyed meditation), took phenomenology further than mere objects and questioned Being (in this sense encompassing all aspects of an Indo-European copula and its broader meaning 'to exist', as in pure being; to on in Greek as first spoken about by Parmenides, which came to be known as ontology in modern times). To do so he would involve himself with impressive ancient Grecian philosophical studies because he believed they were questioning pure Being without the constraints the west has encumbered itself with over the past one and a half thousand years on account of presuppositions and anthropomorphic Christianity. For, despite the ancient Grecian metaphysical primitiveness, they concerned themselves with Being rather than being, as it were. And thus they many times resembled Buddhism, interestingly.

genkaku

@Joshua -- There is something delightful about noticing similar thought-streams coming from varied sources. Wowsers! In schools and in book stores, everything is compartmentalized, separated, and distinguished one from the next. But then, as the Vedas observed, "Truth is one. Wise men call it by many names." And that statement too has a yummy refreshment to it. What before may have been called "different" is now more like "the same." Thousands of years and thousands of miles may separate one thinker from the next and yet -- holy mackerel! -- they're hip deep in the same stuff. Recognitions like this can lead some to a kind of over-arching and over-weaning ecumenism.

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but the phenomenon strikes me as worth underlining. (It took me some time to get over my own wowsers and ecumenism.) Dharma here, Dharma there, Dharma everywhere. How kool is that?

The recognition of similarities and what may seem like a kind of mystical symbiosis does nudge individual efforts along. It has a comforting and consoling feel to it and spiritual practice does seem to require a bit of head-patting along the way.

But I do hope that those with an inclination to practice whatever discipline suits them will do just that ... just practice and see what happens. What others do and do not do can be quite interesting or inspiring. But it is only what each of us does -- with as much honesty and determination as possible -- that can ever hope to bring the Dharma to life.

Sorry for the toot. Mods, please delete if this is too far afield.

federica

Well to be honest, I nearly deleted all the quoted text, but refrained from doing so. Loads of replies....
Regardless of reference, there is a danger it breaches copyright:
if you post a link to a piece of text, please don't replicate such massive chunks of it. Give "tasters" but there really is no need to fill the thread with huge swathes of quotations.
And before anybody jumps on me, I believe @Lincoln actually deleted a similar post some time ago, for the same reasons.
Though as ever, I could be wrong....If I am, I apologise. But I still don't see the need to create such a huge wall of text if the link is also given.

Thanks....:)

Joshua

I was hasty because I don't have internet and so when I do I must hurry. I thought people might enjoy this; I did realise on account of the length alone they might not. Sorry, I have little other options, though I suppose I could prepare things on my PC at my internetless home and flashdrive them here. I will not post chapters in the future.

thickpaper

Well to be honest, I nearly deleted all...
... @Lincoln actually deleted...

May I suggest a policy of "Would Buddha delete this post?"

Yay!;)

DaltheJigsaw

Thank you for this thread!

Cinorjer

Well to be honest, I nearly deleted all the quoted text, but refrained from doing so. Loads of replies....
Regardless of reference, there is a danger it breaches copyright:
if you post a link to a piece of text, please don't replicate such massive chunks of it. Give "tasters" but there really is no need to fill the thread with huge swathes of quotations.
And before anybody jumps on me, I believe @Lincoln actually deleted a similar post some time ago, for the same reasons.
Though as ever, I could be wrong....If I am, I apologise. But I still don't see the need to create such a huge wall of text if the link is also given.

Thanks....:)

I think a link would have been better, but since this was originally written about 300 BC, probably safe from copyright claims in this case.

I didn't make it past the usual flawed attempt to prove the illogical (that the soul exists after death) using logic. This same flawed approach was used throughout time by Christian apologists to "prove" that God exists, etc. Doesn't work.

Jason

Actually, it was written in 2006. (Note that's it's a reproduction of a subchapter from Anthony Kenny's book, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy.) Copyright laws still apply.

federica

May I suggest a policy of "Would Buddha delete this post?"

No, you may not.


It has nothing whatsoever to do with what the Buddha would or wouldn't do. As Jason points out, it's still copyright.
In a court of law, telling the Judge "well, the Buddha probably would/wouldn't have deleted it", isn't going to carry an awful lot of weight, really, is it?

:rolleyes:

Cinorjer

Actually, it was written in 2006. (Note that's it's a reproduction of a subchapter from Anthony Kenny's book, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy.) Copyright laws still apply.

Ah, it is talking about ancient philosophers and what they said. My mistake.

pegembara

Greco-Buddhism, sometimes spelled Graeco-Buddhism, refers to the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism, which developed between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE in the area covered by the Indian sub-continent, and modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-western border regions of modern India. It was a cultural consequence of a long chain of interactions begun by Greek forays into India from the time of Alexander the Great

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

The 1st Gandhara Buddha statues had Greek features !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_Buddha_(Tokyo_National_Museum)

thickpaper

May I suggest a policy of "Would Buddha delete this post?"

No, you may not.


It has nothing whatsoever to do with what the Buddha would or wouldn't do. As Jason points out, it's still copyright.
In a court of law, telling the Judge "well, the Buddha probably would/wouldn't have deleted it", isn't going to carry an awful lot of weight, really, is it?

:rolleyes:

I was referring to the general principle of censoring posts. I think most people would prefer less censorship here, and most would fully endorse that some posts need censoring.

For example, in another thread today @Lincoln politely and skilfully asked a member not to behave in a certain way rather than censoring. That seems both more Buddhist and better modding, at least to me.

federica

Censoring posts is one thing.
Preventing possible action due to breach of copyright is quite another.
Deletion and censoring is quite justified in those cases.

Moderating rarely has anything to do with Buddhism.
Even on a Buddhist forum.

thickpaper

Moderating rarely has anything to do with Buddhism.
Even on a Buddhist forum.

That is a shame. I would have hoped in a Buddhist forum the moderators moderated in a Buddhist way. In fact, I am sure they often do.

Cloud

@thickpaper, I don't think there's a "Buddhist way" to moderate, there's only each moderator's way to moderate, and that is based on the kind of environment and appropriate content that @Lincoln wants on his forum (we try "minimal appropriate action" more than not). Moderating isn't as easy as it seems and there's a lot of activity here, so we do the best we can and try not to be heavy-handed in our approach.

We don't censor... that makes us sound like we're oppressing people and silencing them or something. If something gets removed, it's not appropriate content for this forum and it has nothing to do with free speech but rather inappropriate speech. It's our job, as moderators, to discern when something is over-the-line, and if we screw up we answer to @Lincoln. When we're unsure we usually talk amongst ourselves and he gives us guidance if issues are in doubt; he very much knows what goes on on his forum.

That said, let's please get back on-topic. If you want to talk to me, or @federica, or any other moderator or admin about this, please PM. Thanks.

Linc

In fact, I am sure they often do.

Ha.

Linc

@Lincoln politely and skilfully asked a member not to behave in a certain way rather than censoring. That seems both more Buddhist and better modding, at least to me.

I appreciate the compliment. However, I'm sure you could as easily point to times where you would strongly disagree with my tactics. I don't do what I do to be more Buddhist, I do it because I've been a community manager for 8 years. When you recognize that it is its own skill set, then telling me to moderate as a Buddhist becomes about as silly as telling a professor of Roman history to teach as a Roman.

thickpaper

@Lincoln politely and skilfully asked a member not to behave in a certain way rather than censoring. That seems both more Buddhist and better modding, at least to me.

I appreciate the compliment. However, I'm sure you could as easily point to times where you would strongly disagree with my tactics. I don't do what I do to be more Buddhist, I do it because I've been a community manager for 8 years. When you recognize that it is its own skill set, then telling me to moderate as a Buddhist becomes about as silly as telling a professor of Roman history to teach as a Roman.

When in Rome!:p

I guess the general principle I am endorcing (not "telling") is that buddhist moderators would be practicing well if they moderate in a "buddhist way"; it has nothing to do with the forum type, buddhist or not, imo. Anyways... back to the anchients!

Joshua

I've found quite a few parallels between ideas found in Plato's dialogues and the teachings of the Buddha that are recorded in the Pali Canon (e.g., see my "sharing in the form of dhamma").

I liked it; although I've never read the Republic, I have, however, read synopses on it. I wish impartiality weren't a battle of mine, for Plato is a bit too silly in my eyes for me to have written such a thoughtful and fair article. So kudos to you.

My favourite part, a simple early development, actually having had little to do with the big picture, on the comparison of kamma to a teleological and deontological synthesis was thought-invoking. I've been wanting to write some short theses comparing as many similar technical observations as I could spot between any non-Buddhist philosophy to Buddhism in order to, as you put it, organise my thoughts.

In other words, maybe I ought to open my own blog, since this really isn't the place to post the sort of observations I've been in the habit of posting. Thank you.