Total renunciation and discredit of the body in the Phædon. Different feeling about the body in other Platonic dialogues.
Such total renunciation of the body is put, with dramatic propriety, into the mouth of Sokrates during the last hour of his life. But it would not have been in harmony with the character of Sokrates as other Platonic dialogues present him — in the plenitude of life — manifesting distinguished bodily strength and soldierly efficiency, proclaiming gymnastic training for the body to be co-ordinate with musical training for the mind, and impressed with the most intense admiration for the personal beauty of youth. The human body, which in the Phædon is discredited as a morbid incumbrance corrupting the purity of the soul, is presented to us by Sokrates in the Phædrus as the only sensible object which serves as a mirror and reflection of the beauty of the ideal world:[106] while the Platonic Timæus proclaims (in language not unsuitable to Locke) that sight, hearing, and speech are the sources of our abstract Ideas, and the generating causes of speculative intellect and philosophy.[107] Of these, and of the world of sense generally, an opposite view was appropriate in the Phædon; where the purpose of Sokrates is to console his distressed friends by showing that death was no misfortune, but relief from a burthen. And Plato has availed himself of this impressive situation,[108] to recommend, with every charm of poetical expression, various characteristic dogmas respecting the essential distinction between Ideas and the intelligible world on one side — Perceptions and the sensible world on the other: respecting the soul, its nature akin to the intelligible world, its pre-existence anterior to its present body, and its continued existence after the death of the latter: respecting the condition of the soul before birth and after death, its transition, in the case of most men, into other bodies, either human or animal, with the condition of suffering penalties commensurate to the wrongs committed in this life: finally, respecting the privilege accorded to the souls of such as have passed their lives in intellectual and philosophical occupation, that they shall after death remain for ever disembodied, in direct communion with the world of Ideas.
[106] Plato, Charmidês, p. 155 D. Protagoras, init. Phædrus, p. 250 D. Symposion, pp. 177 C, 210 A.
Æschines, one of the Socratici viri or fellow disciples of Sokrates along with Plato, composed dialogues (of the same general nature as those of Plato) wherein Sokrates was introduced conversing or arguing. Æschines placed in the mouth of Sokrates the most intense expressions of passionate admiration towards the person of Alkibiades. See the Fragments cited by the Rhetor Aristeides, Orat. xlv. pp. 20-23, ed. Dindorf. Aristeides mentions (p. 24) that various persons in his time mistook these expressions ascribed to Sokrates for the real talk of Sokrates himself. Compare also the Symposion of Xenophon, iv. 27.
[107] Plato, Timæus, p. 47, A-D. Consult also the same dialogue, pp. 87-88, where Plato insists on the necessity of co-ordinate attention both to mind and to body, and on the mischiefs of highly developed force in the mind unless it be accompanied by a corresponding development of force in the body.
[108] Compare the description of the last discourse of Pætus Thrasea. Tacitus, Annal. xvi. 34.
Plato’s argument does not prove the immortality of the soul. Even if it did prove that, yet the mode of pre-existence and the mode of post-existence, of the soul, would be quite undetermined.
The main part of Plato’s argumentation, drawn from the general assumptions of his philosophy, is directed to prove the separate and perpetual existence of the soul, before as well as after the body. These arguments, interesting as specimens of the reasoning which satisfied Plato, do not prove his conclusion.[109] But even if that conclusion were admitted to be proved, the condition of the soul, during such anterior and posterior existence, would be altogether undetermined, and would be left to the free play of sentiment and imagination. There is no subject upon which the poetical genius of Plato has been more abundantly exercised.[110] He has given us two different descriptions of the state of the soul before its junction with the body (Timæus, and Phædrus), and three different descriptions of its destiny after separation from the body (Republic, Gorgias, Phædon). In all the three, he supposes an adjudication and classification of the departed souls, and a better or worse fate allotted to each according to the estimate which he forms of their merits or demerits during life: but in each of the three, this general idea is carried out by a different machinery. The Hades of Plato is not announced even by himself as anything more than approximation to the truth: but it embodies his own ethical and judicial sentence on the classes of men around him — as the Divina Commedia embodies that of Dante on antecedent individual persons. Plato distributes rewards and penalties in the measure which he conceives to be deserved: he erects his own approbation and disapprobation, his own sympathy and antipathy, into laws of the unknown future state: the Gods, whom he postulates, are imaginary agents introduced to execute the sentences which he dictates. While others, in their conceptions of posthumous existence, assured the happiest fate, sometimes even divinity itself, to great warriors and law-givers — to devoted friends and patriots like Harmodius and Aristogeiton — to the exquisite beauty of Helen — or to favourites of the Gods like Ganymêdes or Pelops[111] — Plato claims that supreme distinction for the departed philosopher.
[109] Wyttenbach has annexed to his edition of the Phædon an instructive review of the argumentation contained in it respecting the Immortality of the soul. He observes justly — “Videamus jam de Phædone, qui ab omni antiquitate is habitus est liber, in quo rationes immortalitatis animarum gravissimé luculentissiméque exposita essent. Quæ quidem libro laus et auctoritas conciliata est, non tam firmitate argumentorum, quam eloquentiâ Platonis,” &c. (Disputat. De Placit. Immort. Anim. p. 10). The same feeling, substantially, is expressed by one of the disputants in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, who states that he assented to the reasoning while he was reading the dialogue, but that as soon as he had laid down the book, his assent all slipped away from him. I have already mentioned that Panætius, an extreme admirer of Plato on most points, dissented from him about the immortality of the soul (Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 11, 24 — i. 32, 79), and declared the Phædon to be spurious. Galen also mentions (De Format. Fœtûs, vol. iv. pp. 700-702. Kühn) that he had written a special treatise (now lost) to prove that the reasonings in the Phædon were self-contradictory, and that he could not satisfy himself, either about the essence of the soul, or whether it was mortal or immortal. Compare his treatise Περὶ Οὐσίας τῶν φυσικῶν δυνάμεων — iv. pp. 762-763 — and Περὶ τῶν τῆς ψυχῆς ἠθῶν, iv. 773. In this last passage, he represents the opinion of Plato to be — That the two inferior souls, the courageous and the appetitive, are mortal, in which he (Galen) agrees, and that the rational soul alone is immortal, of which he (Galen) is not persuaded. Now this view of Plato’s opinion is derived from the Republic and Timæus, not from the Phædon, in which last the triple soul is not acknowledged. We may thus partly understand the inconsistencies, which Galen pointed out in his lost Treatise, in the argumentation of the Phædon: wherein one of the proofs presented to establish the immortality of the soul is — That the soul is inseparably and essentially identified with life, and cannot admit death (p. 105 D). This argument, if good at all, is just as good to prove the immortality of the two inferior souls, as of the superior and rational soul. Galen might therefore remark that it did not consist with the conclusion which he drew from the Timæus and the Republic.
[110] Wyttenbach, l. c. p. 19. “Vidimus de philosophâ hujus loci parte, quâ demonstratur, Animos esse immortales. Altera pars, quâ ostenditur, qualis sit ille post hanc vitam status, fabulosé et poeticé à Platone tractata est.” &c.