A note from Nate:68c-d: We get a discussion of self-restraint that is remarkable both in its own right and in comparison with the _Rep._ passage. Here too there is at least a hint of the Socratic puzzlement at the very notion of self-restraint. Here of course Socrates is less Plato's Socrates, so a motivational monist, so the problem of making any sense of the idea is even sharper...
68d: As translated this appears to be an argument from contradiction.
69a-b: Compare of course the Prot. discussion of the metretic art.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Day 13: Phaedo 67e-73b
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A few more notes:
ReplyDeleteI find Plato's metaphysics of the mind and soul to be totally fascinating and confusing (Where on the Divided Line does the soul go?). Even here in the Phaedo, Plato is quite cagey about it: the soul is *like* the Forms, it shares a number of properties with them ... but it's far from clear that the soul *is* a Form. So what is it? This is a warning: I'll probably be posting a bit about this question in the next few days.
More specifically for today, I wanted to note a distinction between two questions that Cebes poses at 70a-b. He wants to know:
(1) What kind of thing is the soul? If it is something like the Homeric conception of pneuma, this seems to tell against the argument Socrates has just made for its disembodied existence.
(2) Does the disembodied soul "still [possess] some capability and intelligence"? In other words, even if we can establish that the soul is the kind of thing that can exist separately from the body, can it be active in its characteristic way? And if so, would its disembodied activities even remotely resemble its embodied ones?
Socrates obviously goes on to address Cebes's first question extensively. But to what extent - and how convincingly - does he address Cebes's second question? Moreover, isn't the second question the one we most care about?
68c-d: is there any suggestion in the 'Republic' that the auxiliaries possess an ersatz sort of courage? On the account here, it looks like they would not have real courage, since they are not philosophers.
ReplyDelete68d: the suggestion seems to be that the brave non-philosophers are made brave by fear: "they face death, when they do, for fear of greater evils". Does it follow from this that the greater the fear felt, the greater the bravery of him that feels? That seems to get things a bit skewed: cf. 'Gorgias' 497c ff.
71d ff.: all this talk about reincarnation. How seriously are we meant to take this as representing the views of either S or Plato, esp. since the conversation involves Pythagoreans?
On Colfert's (2): presumably, if Cebes is right that S's argument leads to endorsing recollection as the source of learning, then it would seem that the soul must have some sort of active intellectual power, on pain of endorsing the view that an inactive, inert soul was capable of learning.
(Note that if the soul just **knew** stuff prior to incarnation, then that might be compatible with the soul being passive. But Cebes says, "we must at some previous time have learned what we now recollect". That might suggest that the soul actively learns prior to incarnation.)
PS. I have caught up on the reading ...
I am not feeling very well, and I have fallen behind, but I will try to catch up tonight.
ReplyDeletePryio: Thanks for your note; that's a good point. I've often wondered in what sense the pre-incartate soul in the Meno can be said to actively learn the stuff it recollects. After all, recollection is supposed to offer some sort of solution to the Meno Problem; but if the pre-incarnate soul must learn what it later recollects, wouldn't the pre-incarnate just face the Meno problem all over again? For these reasons, I suspect that however the pre-incarnate soul acquires its knowledge, it must be quite different from what we normally think of as active learning, e.g., through inquiry. Of course, this in no way prevents pre-incarnate knowledge acquisition from being active. But if it is active, I'm still a bit unsure about what kind of activity it is.
ReplyDelete