Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

5. Ethics, Psychology, and Metaphysics in the Phaedo

90 5 Ethics, Psychology, and Metaphysics in the Phaedo The Phaedo is the story of Socrates’ death in prison, as recounted to two of his Megarian admirers, Eucleides and Terpsion, by Phaedo of Elis, who had been present at the end along with many other of Socrates’ closest associates—but not Plato, who was ill (59b). Its basic theme is that philosophy is practice for death (64a ff.; 67e). In so presenting Socrates’ last conversations and immortalizing his memory, Plato aims to show that the “genuine philosopher,” so far from being sad or afraid at the moment of death, welcomes it as a release from what has ultimately impeded the full realization of his search for truth and happiness. Already in the Gorgias and more recently in the Cratylus (400c) we read of the body as the tomb of the soul (soma-sema)—and in the Phaedo the man who fears to die is no true philosopher, but a “body-lover” (68c). Suicide is against the divine decree, forbidden as a soldier on guard is forbidden to abandon his post, but at God’s word we should be content to leave this present life, for death is nothing more than the separation and release of the soul from the body (67d). That leaves Socrates with the task of explaining how the soul, when separated, actually survives the body—which he tries to do as the dialogue proceeds. It also leaves 91 him with other problems, but since these are not treated directly in the Phaedo, they are only to be noted here. If we leave aside the question of the soul’s precise relationship with the body and what we might think of as the unity of the “person ,” the most important of these problems arises from the fact that, according to Socrates, the body fills us with loves and desires and fears and fantasies and all kinds of nonsense; hence arise wars and battles and civil strife, all aimed at getting wealth to satisfy the body and its demands for pleasure (66c). But the problem then is: Why does the soul cave in to the body so easily? Or is it not a matter of caving in, but merely of being inevitably obstructed? And what does all this tell us about the nature of the soul itself? Are the soul’s difficulties an inherent weakness, or does Plato see them solely as arising from contamination and the need for “purification”? The latter may seem the more reasonable explanation, for if the soul is removed from bodily contact it would seem to be safe. And the likening of the soul to a sea god covered with barnacles and other sea-wrack (which appears in Book 10 of the later Republic) may seem an echo of this way of thinking. But again, why is the soul so easily contaminated? If such are among the questions Plato is pondering, the soul and body must be only extrinsically connected, and “we” must ultimately be identified with our souls, which Plato never claims specifically in any of his certainly authentic writings, though it is proposed directly in what I believe to be the spurious dialogue Alcibiades 1 (129a–130e). Yet if the Alcibiades (a favorite neo-Platonic text and taught as the best introduction to Platonic thinking in the schools) is spurious, its author may be pardoned for attributing expressly to Plato a doctrine that he seems to accept in the Phaedo. In any case, after the Phaedo Plato’s account of the soul itself changes, though the full implications of that change for what he holds to be the real “I” are only finally clarified in the Timaeus. The difficulty about what “I” am is highlighted by the account Plato gives of being born. In the first of Socrates’ arguments for imThe Phaedo 92 The Phaedo mortality—the so-called argument from opposites—the soul is indeed said to be born, that is, to come into the body, to be made “incarnate”—which (following the Meno) begs the question in favor of its preexistence, since it is taken as axiomatic that all, not just some, opposites derive from their opposites and thus being alive must derive—as an “ancient tale” has it—from being dead: that is, from existing in another place (70c). On the other hand, of course, one might object that “we” are born—or better, conceived—when the...