Phaedo is a deeply affecting story, but the philosophy is problematic. It is one of the dialogues in which Plato – or, Plato speaking though his avatar, Socrates – discusses the theory of forms. The idea is that there is a world of forms, in which the essence of things exist. Things in our world are only things insofar as they contain or reflect their essence. A table, for example, is a table insofar as it has the quality that constitutes tableness. The feeling of hunger partakes of the essence of hungerness. A shrewish spouse is only a shrew insofar as she looks and behaves like Hera. The idea is most famously described in the allegory of the cave, in Book Seven of the Republic. In that story, a race of people are chained to the floor of a cave. A fire is lit behind them and between the fire and the inhabitants, the puppet-masters create a shadow-play for them. Although the inhabitants can only perceive the shadows on the cave wall, rather than the things that cause those shadows, they mistake the shadows for the things themselves. One of the inhabitants escapes and goes to the world outside. He observes the world without the intermediation of shadow-play and returns to tell his former stable-mates. Having never seen the world of forms, they ridicule him, call him crazy and ostracize him.
He reprises this in the Phaedo. Admittedly, my classical Greek is not what it used to be, and I have relied on a translation. For ‘equals’ here, I would substitute ‘essence’:
And must we not allow, that when I or any one, looking at any object, observes that the thing which he sees aims at being some other thing, but falls short of, and cannot be, that other thing, but is inferior, he who makes this observation must have had a previous knowledge of that to which the other, although similar, was inferior?
Certainly.
And has not this been our own case in the matter of equals and of absolute equality?
Precisely.
Then we must have known equality previously to the time when we first saw the material equals, and reflected that all these apparent equals strive to attain absolute equality, but fall short of it?
Very true.
And we recognize also that this absolute equality has only been known, and can only be known, through the medium of sight or touch, or of some other of the senses, which are all alike in this respect?
Yes, Socrates, as far as the argument is concerned, one of them is the same as the other.
From the senses then is derived the knowledge that all sensible things aim at an absolute equality of which they fall short?
Yes.
Then before we began to see or hear or perceive in any way, we must have had a knowledge of absolute equality, or we could not have referred to that standard the equals which are derived from the senses?—for to that they all aspire, and of that they fall short.
No other inference can be drawn from the previous statements.
The idea that we recognize things as what they are because they contain an essence is intuitively attractive. Justice Stewart recognized the principle when he articulated his definition of pornography. However, the theory hits speed bumps upon scrutiny. What is a shape that contains the essence of triangle but that is neither right, nor acute, nor obtuse, neither equilateral nor isosceles nor scalene? I am not sure – but it isn’t a triangle. If we want to develop a theory of knowledge, we might be better off describing things in the way that linguists in the sixties described phonemes. In The Sound Pattern of English, Chomsky and Halle broke English phonemes down into a finite list of distinctive binary features (‘voiced’, ‘front’, ‘back’, ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘round’, ‘velar’, ‘labial’, e.g.). So, to describe a phoneme, you fill out the grid with the applicable plus and minus marks. For example, a non-umlauted ‘u’ sound would be + syllabic, +back, +high, +back and -everything else. An umlauted ‘u’ would have the same features, except it would be -back and +front. I think that you could describe the real world using the same process – you would just, to quote Jaws, need a larger grid.[1] Under this scheme, instead of essences, you would use features. One of those features would be three-sidedness. You could slot in the other features that a triangle may have as applicable.
Note to self: how would a feature be defined? With other features? Oi.
The problem with the Phaedo is not the theory of forms. Instead, it is the way Socrates argues. He makes appalling logical leaps. He argues by reductio ad absurdum without questioning the contradiction he finishes at. He shits on the scientific method. He makes a succession of small logical leaps that, when strung together, make your jaw drop. He argues to score points, rather than to find the truth. He is someone who I would like arguing my case to a jury, if I drank too much, blacked out, assaulted an under-aged girl, defamed a prominent citizen and then hit an old lady, but he is not someone I would want to be a prosecutor, if I were paying taxes.
Here is one of Socrates’ students, Simmias, making a point with which I am sympathetic. He says that the mind is caused by the body, and because of that, when the body dies, the mind ceases to exist (for ‘soul’, insert ‘mind’ or, where applicable, ‘consciousness’):
In this respect, replied Simmias:—Suppose a person to use the same argument about harmony and the lyre—might he not say that harmony is a thing invisible, incorporeal, perfect, divine, existing in the lyre which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality? And when someone breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony survives and has not perished—you cannot imagine, he would say, that the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves which are mortal remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and immortal nature and kindred, has perished—perished before the mortal. The harmony must still be somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay before anything can happen to that. The thought, Socrates, must have occurred to your own mind that such is our conception of the soul; and that when the body is in a manner strung and held together by the elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, then the soul is the harmony or due proportionate admixture of them. But if so, whenever the strings of the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disease or other injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of music or of works of art, of course perishes at once, although the material remains of the body may last for a considerable time, until they are either decayed or burnt. And if any one maintains that the soul, being the harmony of the elements of the body, is first to perish in that which is called death, how shall we answer him?
What Simmias asserts is a problem for Socrates. Socrates has been condemned to drink poison. Simmias and the rest of the gang are visiting him on death row. It is three O’Clock in the afternoon and he has a five PM appointment with a cup of hemlock. He wants to prove that the soul is immortal. If that is untrue, so much the worse for the truth. He addresses Simmias’ point in a long, convoluted reductio ad absurdum:
Let me put the matter, Simmias, he said, in another point of view: Do you imagine that a harmony or any other composition can be in a state other than that of the elements, out of which it is compounded?
Certainly not.
Or do or suffer anything other than they do or suffer?
He agreed.
Then a harmony does not, properly speaking, lead the parts or elements which make up the harmony, but only follows them.
He assented.
For harmony cannot possibly have any motion, or sound, or other quality which is opposed to its parts.
That would be impossible, he replied.
And does not the nature of every harmony depend upon the manner in which the elements are harmonized?
I do not understand you, he said.
I mean to say that a harmony admits of degrees, and is more of a harmony, and more completely a harmony, when more truly and fully harmonized, to any extent which is possible; and less of a harmony, and less completely a harmony, when less truly and fully harmonized.
True.
But does the soul admit of degrees? or is one soul in the very least degree more or less, or more or less completely, a soul than another?
Not in the least.
Yet surely of two souls, one is said to have intelligence and virtue, and to be good, and the other to have folly and vice, and to be an evil soul: and this is said truly?
Yes, truly.
But what will those who maintain the soul to be a harmony say of this presence of virtue and vice in the soul?—will they say that here is another harmony, and another discord, and that the virtuous soul is harmonized, and herself being a harmony has another harmony within her, and that the vicious soul is inharmonical and has no harmony within her?
I cannot tell, replied Simmias; but I suppose that something of the sort would be asserted by those who say that the soul is a harmony.
And we have already admitted that no soul is more a soul than another; which is equivalent to admitting that harmony is not more or less harmony, or more or less completely a harmony?
Quite true.
And that which is not more or less a harmony is not more or less harmonized?
True.
And that which is not more or less harmonized cannot have more or less of harmony, but only an equal harmony?
Yes, an equal harmony.
Then one soul not being more or less absolutely a soul than another, is not more or less harmonized?
Exactly.
And therefore has neither more nor less of discord, nor yet of harmony?
She has not.
And having neither more nor less of harmony or of discord, one soul has no more vice or virtue than another, if vice be discord and virtue harmony?
Not at all more.
Or speaking more correctly, Simmias, the soul, if she is a harmony, will never have any vice; because a harmony, being absolutely a harmony, has no part in the inharmonical.
No.
And therefore a soul which is absolutely a soul has no vice?
How can she have, if the previous argument holds?
Then, if all souls are equally by their nature souls, all souls of all living creatures will be equally good?
I agree with you, Socrates, he said.
And can all this be true, think you? he said; for these are the consequences which seem to follow from the assumption that the soul is a harmony?
It cannot be true.
I admit that I do not follow the argument entirely. I think that some of it is a smoke screen and some of it depends on concepts that are foreign to a modern reader. If I understand it correctly, he says that Simmias’ analogy of the mind to a tune is wrong because the mind is not a tune. This is the case – the old man says – for two reasons. First, a mind has agency, while a tune is just, a tune. Second, a mind has a certain innate mind-ness that does not allow it to admit of degrees that a tune does not have. The first of these points is irrelevant. Simmias’ analogy of a mind to a tune merely illustrates that the mind is the product of the brain in the way that a tune is the product of a lyre. It makes no assertions – and need not assert – anything about the form of the product. Second, the assumption that the soul does not admit of degrees is just, well, untrue. There are gradations of consciousness. The argument does not work if you admit that, but nobody calls Socrates on it.
Here is Socrates on the scientific method:
However, this was the method which I adopted: I first assumed some principle which I judged to be the strongest, and then I affirmed as true whatever seemed to agree with this, whether relating to the cause or to anything else; and that which disagreed I regarded as untrue.
That’s no way to build a septic system, let alone an atom bomb.
A resident in my park in northern New York recently told the manager, Mike, that she wants to buy a double-wide currently owned by the estate of an old lady whose two sons hate Mike’s guts. I have been scared that that double-wide would be sold to someone who would take it out of the park, so I was happy to learn about the sale. Once Mike told me about it, I wrote up a new lease and a bill of sale for the new home and the old one.
That home has been for sale for a while. The old lady’s sons want twenty grand for it. I don’t want to buy it because I am capitally-constrained these days, but I don’t want it taken out of the park, either. The loss of a home means the loss of a stream of revenue that can be valued as C/(r-i), where C is cash flow, r is the interest rate and i is annual increases in the interest rate. So if a lot throws off $400 per month, the interest rate is 8 percent and lot rent increases by 3 percent each year, that lot is worth $96,000 full and $0 empty.[2] A rational economic actor would spend $20,000 to save that $96,000, but writing the check for $20,000 still hurts.
A few people have put in offers to buy that home, but several movers have told them that it can’t be moved. This is because access to the hitch-ends is blocked by two other homes and a berm has built up around the perimeter of the home. When I was in the park last week, I had a mover look at it. He took off a few skirting panels, squinted and said, ‘I could move it’.
‘That’s not the answer I wanted to hear’.
‘But it would cost twenty grand.’
If I understood him correctly, he would move it by running chains underneath the sections the long way and attaching them to the hitches from underneath the home. He would then drag it out backwards. Because the home is heavy and he would pull it slowly, it would not fishtail when he pulled it. ‘That’s a lot of money to move a twenty-grand home’, I said. The mover, Mike and two other guys wearing ball caps agreed.
The old lady’s two sons hate Mike because Mike lived next to one of them for a while and dated his daughter.
After I wrote up the lease and the bills of sale, I called Rent Manager to ask them how I could move the record of the woman who wants to buy the double wide from her current lot to the lot where the double wide sits. They told me that I would need to move her out of her current lot and then move her into the new lot. I did that, and received an error message.
‘What does the error message say?’, the lady on the phone asked me.
‘It says ‘You do not have bank permission to do that’.’
‘Are you moving her into a different property?’
‘Same property.’
‘Are you using a different bank?’
‘Same bank.’
‘Are you using a different account at that bank?’
‘Same account.’
‘Can I put you on a brief hold?’
‘Of course.’
Rent Manager’s hold music doesn’t try to be cool or relaxing. It leans into its cheesiness, but it isn’t too cheesy. After five minutes, the lady came back and said, ‘I do not understand why you can’t move this tenant. I will have to transfer you to our banking specialists. Can I put you on another hold?’
‘Of course.’
As the music booted up again, I reflected that we weren’t moving the resident. She would move when she filled her car with her four cats, turned the key in the lock and took possession. We were just trying to change the record. Inside the computer – well, inside Rent Manager’s system, which sits in the cloud – was an idealized replica of the whole park, including units, residents, bank accounts, existing obligations and recurring payment obligations. As with an MRI, you can zoom in on these, zoom out and slice them and dice them by producing balance sheets, P&L reports, cash flow reports, rent rolls, budgets, financial statement comparisons, project lists, vacancy, turnover and availability reports, and receivable and payable reports. We weren’t ‘moving’ Mrs. Smith. We were merely changing the record to reflect her move. But it was important to change the idealized world – the world of forms – that lived in the computer so that we could keep track of the real world.
Rent Manager is not unique. Every business has a real-world manifestation – the place where patients are treated, ditches are dug, vig is collected, informants whacked – and an idealized manifestation, where records are kept. In the world of forms, we use categories that don’t exist in the real world. When you buy a pallet of salt, say, in the real world, money goes from your pocket to Lowes’ bank account and a pallet of salt shows up at your property. In the record book, cash is credited and supplies are debited. These categories don’t exist. They are purely figments of the imaginary world we build. Pacioli dreamt them up because they are a way of representing transactions on a balance sheet, but they do not look like a pallet of salt or a bunch of money any more than the number ‘three’ looks like three sheep. We add them to our imaginary world because they are a convenient way to keep track of phenomena that happen in the real world.
I have never been good at accounting. Accounting is a rationalist enterprise and I am an empiricist.
The world of forms that we build differs from that described by Socrates in two ways. First, we create it. It does not exist independently of us. Second, it is there for a purpose. We use it to plan our activities and communicate with the taxing authority, with regulators and with investors. But it is separate from the brick-and-mortar of the business itself, and it is there. In that respect, Socrates was right. We are stuck with it in some manner whether we like it or not.
Phaedo is a very moving story. When the action starts, Socrates has been found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens. As a punishment, he has been given the choice between exile and death. He has chosen death because he sees himself as a social being, rather than merely a biological entity.[3] His trial fell during a two or three week period during which the government of Athens sent a ceremonial mission to Delos. While that mission was pending, all public executions were suspended. The ships from Delos have returned the previous day and the time of the execution has been set for the afternoon of the current day. His students are admitted to death row for one last session. There are a few funny narrative details. A low-level attendant at the death chamber asks Socrates not to talk so much because talking slows the effectiveness of the hemlock. People who talk while they are being poisoned, he says, sometimes have to take the poison two or even three times. We all know that asking Socrates not to talk is like asking the sun not to shine. The only way to stop him is to sentence him to death and that has been done already. Socrates tells the kid, ‘Well, give me the poison two or three times, then’. Early in the dialogue his wife, Xanthippe, cries and says, ‘I will never see you again!’ Socrates tells someone, ‘Take her away, will you? She is acting like a woman.’ Near the end, he strokes the hair of one of his students in what is described as a friendly gesture. Bros before hos, a modern reader thinks.
The story is poignant for two reasons. The first is the way that Socrates behaves. Socrates is facing death. In the Apology, the story of his trial, he faced his accusers. Now, he is facing something much bigger. Instead of exhibiting weakness, he sets out to prove the immortality of the soul. He uses reason and logic and, when those fail, rhetorical cheap tricks. At times, he appears to not believe what he is saying, but that doesn’t matter; he is fighting for something more important than truth. He fights hard, long and well, but the story ends with the paralyzing effects of the poison moving from his feet to his thighs to his pelvis to his heart.
The second thing that is moving about the story is the way his friends behave. They join him to do what he likes most for one last time. They don’t call him on it when he goes off piste. After he dies, they found a school and write books about him. He must have been very good company.
[1] I will leave the question of whether the grid that contains all the binary features that can describe the world is infinite or merely very, very large (as big, say, as the number of all the grains of sand on every beach in California) to my students.
[2] $96,000 = ($400*12)/(.08-.03).
[3] As with everything Socrates, his motives for choosing execution should not be taken at face value. He was seventy when he was sentenced to death. Had he been twenty-five, he might have chosen exile. When he was young, he fought in the Persian war. Choosing death gave him the chance to be a war hero in his youth and a martyr in his old age.