Sorglose Nacht

Overview

Socrates, on his deathbed, lays down four arguments for the immortality of the soul to his group of disciples and friends.

The Setup

Phaedo recounts the story of Socrates’ death. Socrates’ death took place so long after his trial because of an Athenian holy season, in which the city was not allowed to be “polluted by executions.” Many friends were present at Socrates’ deathbed, but Plato, apparently, was ill.

1. RHAPSODIZING

   1. The discussion starts with Socrates casually remarking on light things - the apparent attachment of pleasure to pain and why he’s suddenly taken to writing verse since he’s been in jail (he was told to in a dream!).
   2. Socrates then sends an envoy to the philosopher Evenus: Come along! Cebes, befuddled, asks Socrates why “a man ought not to take his own life, but that the philosopher will be ready to follow the dying”. Socrates claims that
      1. Our lives are the possessions of the Gods, and therefore we have no right to take them ourselves.
      2. However, a philosopher should not grieve at his death, as the rewards of the afterlife certainly make the experience of death a “far better thing for the good than for the evil.” He goes on to explain (c):
   3. Death is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body. Now, the philosopher should care not for the pleasures of the body, and hence, the wise man desires nothing more than to enact this very separation of the soul from the body.
      1. The senses deceive us when it comes to the quest for knowledge. The body is a hindrance, not a help.
      2. The philosopher gets the work of knowledge done best with the mind alone; the soul can attain truth best as revealed to her in thought.
      3. Further, our eyes cannot behold absolute (justice|truth|beauty|etc.) Again, our bodies hinder our souls’ progress toward truth. Thus, “either [absolute] knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death.”
      4. Hence, he who repines at death is hardly a philosopher. For at the end, all the vagaries of courage and temperance in the face of death (especially for the philosopher!) should be subsumed by the promises of wisdom in the afterlife.
   4. Cebes, thus, poses the question: “many arguments are required in order to prove that when the man is dead the soul yet exists, and has any force of intelligence.” Socrates is ready to respond.

2. THE FIRST ARGUMENT (THE CYCLICAL ARGUMENT)

   1. Socrates starts with an appeal to a Greek belief in reincarnation. However, in the same breath, he admits that there is no verification of this. So, he suggests starting with a broader appeal. Aren’t all opposites generated reciprocally? (aka. no good without evil).
      1. And this generation is actually “a passing from one to the other” - aka. heating and cooling, division and composition - that is, any opposites require an intermediate process.
   2. So, by analogy to sleep:waking, we are to understand death:life. The process of generation of sleep is falling asleep, and of waking is waking up.
   3. If this is true, by inference (and extension), we can believe in the birth of the dead to the world of the living. And hence the souls of the dead must continue to exist.

3. THE SECOND ARGUMENT (THE RECOLLECTIVE ARGUMENT)

   1. Cebes now offers that Socrates’ favorite doctrine of recollection seems to presuppose a previous time in which we learned what we can come to recollect. Cebes reminds us of the proof of this doctrine (from the Meno) of Meno’s slave remembering geometry.
   2. Socrates offers a second proof of this argument:
      1. If the image of one thing can bring to mind another (your lover’s garment, i.e.), and thus if recollection can be triggered either by things like or unlike.
      2. Extrapolating from here, if seeing particular pieces of wood and stone, and in identifying them as in some way equal, we are recollecting absolute equality, which we have never seen.
      3. Further, if things can only be understood sensually, we must have known about things like absolute equality before we were born, because we certainly haven’t seen/touched/smelled it in this lifetime. This implies absolutely that all knowledge is recollection.
      4. And the ability to access this knowledge implies an uninterrupted medium in which it was stored. This leads to only two possible conclusions. Either we had this knowledge since birth, and continued to know it throughout life, or else we received it after birth, and then lost it immediately, which doesn’t make any sense.

4. THE THIRD ARGUMENT (THE AFFINITY ARGUMENT)

   1. Now, everyone is sufficiently convinced that we’re born from the dead, but apparently not that when we die our souls don’t blow away in the wind and scatter. Socrates suggests here that it might be instructive to know something about the nature of the soul.
   2. Namely, Socrates wants to show that the soul is “uncompounded” and hence “indissoluble.”
      1. The aforementioned essences (Forms), it is agreed, must always be the same (unchanging). And the particulars that partake of Form F are contrawise always changing. Further, you can see and touch the particulars but not F.
      2. So, let’s assume that there are two sorts of existences, the seen and the unseen; these correspond to the changing and the unchanging.
      3. Now, if we are two parts, body and soul, and the body has a clear affinity to the changing/visible realm, meanwhile the soul is obviously unseen. The soul, we have argued, trapped by the body, only finds her home realm of the unchanging in wisdom. Hence, it seems that the soul has an affinity with the unchanging.
      4. Nature orders the soul to rule over the body, a nice analogy to the divine ruling over the mortal. Now, if all this is true, it must be admitted that the soul is “almost or altogether indissoluble.”
   3. This discussion now degrades into some crazy speculation about what kinds of animals the souls of the wicked will be reincarnated as. (Proportional justice: Drunkards as asses and pigs, etc.) Additionally, only philosophers are allowed to attain nirvana, with the Gods, and not be passed back into a new body.
   4. Cebes and Simmias both have some concerns with this line of argument, but are reticent to put them to Socrates. Socrates assures them that it’s cool. Simmias goes first. He poses the possibility that soul:body may be more like harmony:lyre. It seems to Simmias that if somebody cuts the lyre’s strings, it pretty much kills the harmony at the same time.
   5. Cebes then poses the problem that soul:body may be something like weaver:coat: That is, the soul may weave many bodies, and outlast them, but still it will die. He needs Socrates to prove that the soul is absolutely immortal to have any confidence.

5. THE FOURTH ARGUMENT: THE ARGUMENT FROM THE FORMS

   1. Socrates begins with Simmias: He takes umbrage starting with the idea that harmony is a compound. If “the soul is a harmony which is made out of strings set in the frame of the body,” it cannot be prior to the elements that compose it. But, granting (3) above, the soul must be prior to the body. Thus the analogy is false (harmony is made last and vanishes first).
      1. Additionally, harmony is absolute (not measured by degrees). So, if the analogy were true, souls would all be equally good (harmonious), as opposed to some being good, some being bad, etc.
      2. Finally, if the soul were a harmony generated by the physical, it wouldn’t caution us against the lusts of the bodily.
   2. So much for Simmias and Harmonia. Now on to Cebes and Cadmus. Socrates will argue from generation and decay. He will premise his argument on the existence of absolute beauty, goodness, etc. The Forms. He first attempts to set up his premises:
      1. He introduces the argument of Causality: Things that are F (other than the F) are F by virtue of partaking of the F. [Clearly stated, 100]
      2. He introduces the argument of Separation: The F is itself by itself, at least in the sense of being separate from, and hence not identical with, the things that partake of it. [end of 102]
      3. He introduces Impurity-S: Sensible things are impure inasmuch as they can (and, in fact, often do) have contrary properties. (Simmias is both tall and short.) This is also the corrolary to:
      4. Purity-F: Forms cannot have contrary properties. [74] (Whereas sensible things that are equal are also unequal, the equal is not unequal, and hence the equal is not identical to any equal sensible thing.)
      5. Also, Self-Predication: For any property F, the F is F. [100, 102] (Largeness)
   3. So, if all this is true, and things can reject a form completely, but not oppose it as such (3 rejects oddness), then G’s simple participation in F doesn’t necessarily mean that F is that whose inherence is essential to the being of G. So, since the soul brings life, as established above, it must participate in the Form of Life. And by Purity-F, this means that the Soul cannot participate in death. Now, the opposite of death is immortality, and if the soul does not admit death, then the soul is immortal.
      1. “The preceding argument shows that the soul will not admit of death…any more than three or the odd number will admit of the even, or fire…of the cold.”

6. CRAZY UNCLE SOCRATES’ GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

   1. Everyone is pretty happy with that, so now Socrates goes off on a wistful rant about the nature of heaven and earth. This includes:
      1. The earth is a round body in the center of the heavens.
      2. The earth is actually at the bottom of a sea of aether (the heavens), and we are deceived that we dwell atop the earth. If we could fly we could see the true earth/heaven.
      3. Rivers circle this true earth, going underground under the deserts, and this is purgatory.
   2. It is basically a charming overture to purity. After which, he goes to take a bath. Crito is sad. Socrates drinks the poison with good cheer. Everyone is sad.

Pitchforkmedia, bastion of flowery independent music reviews, has posted a feature by comedian David Cross (of Mr. Show with Bob and David fame) entitled Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews. It’s funny, and besides picking on Pitchfork for their sometimes elaborate-to-the-point-of-nonsensical reviews, it diagnoses a symptom that has seemingly become endemic to the serious independent music scene, a kind of impossible completist syndrome that has given way to the oft-heard accusation of “music snobbery.”

May I suggest listening to Until it Happens/You Let it Happen, by Maximum Minimum. The fourth album (not counting the re-release of the first three 7-inches on HugTown Records) reaffirms the band’s status as the godfathers of the Taos, N.M. “crying scene.” Like a gilded phoenix rising from the toxic ashes of the death of mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Chernin, Maximum Minimum snarls back like a taunted tiger on steroids (also on acid).

There is something definitively psychological about this kind of completist syndrome in music. In this article, it is suggested that completism stems (perhaps originally) from a “part of the nature of improvisation that breeds the completist in us,” vis à vis jazz. Sumera seems to think that it stops there, though: “There are not too many pop completists out there. The ephemerality of the music cannot sustain the interest of the completist syndrome.” As it were, the Pitchfork scene and your friends deftly testify to the mistakenness of this.

The completist urge is doubtless a radicalization of the simple collector’s urge. It’s not enough (though it is great) to keep listening to Dusk at Cubist Castle when Mississippi Luau exists too. And thousands more. Doubtless, one tries to hold together the indefinite and constantly surging history of a genre, a style, an artist - one thinks these things historiologically. A touching example of this completist phenomenon is the fabulous John Darnielle of Mountain Goats fame. But why? Why is enough never enough?

Humor and philosophy are all tied up. Things that we know are true and scare us make us laugh. Sometimes it’s the only reaction that can save us.

It’s no mistake that Heidegger makes his most substantial mention of Nietzsche in Sein und Zeit under the heading of historicality (See: Mcquarrie translation, Part II Section 5, ¶76, 448-49/396-97.)

The beginning of his [Nietzsche’s] ’study’ [On the Use and Abuse of History] allows us to suppose that he understood more than he has made known to us.
…
But the ground on which authentic historiology is founded is temporality as the existential meaning of the Being of care.

That is, our discourse on history is grounded in our existential temporality, being futural, being-toward-death. And indeed, according to Heidegger, on the anxiety that would paralyze us in the face of a death which is each time ours alone. In the face of this anxiety, the state of what Heidegger calls “inauthentic” Dasein is something akin to the frantic forgetting of its futural being, a plunge eyes closed into the quiet waters of Das Man: the world of measure - clocks, calendars, investment, record collecting. And with David Cross, we laugh at the extensivity with which this plays itself out. As Camus once quipped, “When one has no character one has to apply a method.”

Meanwhile, 1892, Turin. Nietzsche, in the early throes of paralysis progressiva, (he was paralyzed for the last 11 years of his life - during the last seven he could not speak) only repeated phrases: “I am dead because I am stupid,” or else simply “in short, dead.” During those last seven years, eyes wide open, he perhaps lived death as few have - a model of courage for Heidegger’s “authentic” Dasein - registered a silent laugh at the very thing from which we distract ourselves until we are overtaken with it, eyes wide open.

In one of his last meaningful correspondences in 1889, a letter to Peter Gast (a composer who moved to Basel in 1875 to study under Nietzsche and Franz Overbeck and Nietzsche’s “editor” and proofreader in 1876) he wrote:

To my maëstro Pietro:
Sing me a new song: The world is transfigured and all
the heavens are full of joy.

The Crucified