- Title
- Argument from similarity or Socrates' inspired vision: Part I?
- Creator
- Tarrant, Harold
- Relation
- Plato's Phaedo Selected Papers from the Eleventh Symposium Platonicum p. 304-309
- Publisher
- Academia Verlag
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- The 'argument from similarity' is not well regarded as an argument. But the wider passage, 77d5-84b4, contains much that is not argument, and many hints that it is intended to introduce the myth-like vision that follows at 107c-115a. It begins with the needs of the gathering to find some epôidos to charm away their childlike fears, and though Socrates does not affirm that this is what he is doing he ought surely to be trying to supply what the inner child needs at this point. The inner child needs a vision, and in ordinary circumstances a vision will be visual: it will depict what something is like. While one half of Socrates' two-part vision is not available to one's sight, he begins to map out what looks like an unfamiliar world beyond our world which turns out to be just another level of one single world at 108e-113c. Soon Cebes confesses that even the slowest learner would agree that the soul resembles the ever-constant reality rather than an ever-changing bodily one. The dusmathestatos should perhaps include that inner child. The invisibility of that world is linked with the very imaginable picture of Hades at 80d. Pictures of ghost-like beings trailing a bodily shadow emerge from 80e to 81d, and the notion of the soul unable to free itself being reincarnated as various animals appropriate to their past lives (81e-82b9) is again the kind of visual material to which the inner child will respond. The philosopher's fate cannot be painted so vividly, but what he understands is the way in which the soul can become locked in the body by its own volition, so he must try to squeeze out of it, and to avoid the pleasures and pains that distort his view of what is real. The body is prison-like (a wider theme in the dialogue), pleasures and pains are like nails that threaten to fix the soul in place. The alternating cycle of pleasures and pains is imagined visually as Penelope weaving and unweaving her mythical web. And at 80b Socrates concludes his vision by taking us back to that childhood fear of the soul being scattered upon the winds (84b, cf. 77d-e). Can we say that Socrates has used an argument to address the child within? In a sense he has indeed done so, but the argument had been far less important than the pictures that it conjures up. When Simmias and Cebes reveal what has been missing here, it is their rational faculties and not their inner child that speak. Not only had the argument itself been unsatisfactory, but the vision built upon it had not been securely derived from it. In between, however, Socrates reveals further reason for thinking that Plato has been consciously presenting Socrates as a visionary in this passage, and a visionary of a type that the Timaeus (71e6-72b5) considers incompatible with somebody in sane and rational mode. The person who breaks into prophetic mode is properly to be separated from the rational interpreter of the former's utterances. Socrates fears that he seems to be poorer in his gift of prophecy than Apollo's swans, who break into their most beautiful song just as they are about to leave for Hades. Had he been offering us a swan-song during this passage, and offering at least the first part of a vision that will be completed later in his description of those other parts of the universe that embodied humans cannot know? This will require a brief diversion. The Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus that may be found wintering on coastal marshes around the Aegean does have a pleasant sound, which is at its most musical in spring (as are most birds), when it heads for the north of Europe. The composer Sibelius details the sound of sixteen of these birds encountered in Finland in April 1915 during or at the end of their spring migration, describing their calls as somewhere between woodwind and brass. His experience underlies the final movement of his fifth symphony. The swan-song encapsulates the visionary delights of one on his journey home. That Socrates is like the swans and serves the same master is emphasised at 85b. Whether Plato knew or suspected that the swans that deserted Greece in the spring were flying north to return later, we cannot tell, but it is likely that he recognised the story of the swan that is about to dies as the kind of tale likely to be told to young children as an explanation of a departure that would otherwise be as unexplained as the autumn departures of nightingale, swallow and hoopoe–which also required a myth (85a7-8). The singing swans serve as a powerful symbol of transmigration regardless. For all these reasons one has to understand that the argument from similarity is adopted by Socrates not for the rational elimination of doubt but as a tactic for visually engaging and inspiring the child within us and introducing that small child to the delights of the unseen world lying beyond their present experience. That tactic will be resumed once again when the rational adult has been appeased by the final argument for immortality. Detailed examination of the language of 77e3-84b8 against other sections of the dialogue show that it resembles the final myth-like episode more than any other passage of comparable length within the Phaedo. It is time then to rehabilitate this passage and to view it as it was intended, as a contribution to the persuasion not of our ‘rational adult’ but of our slow-learning child within. If this appears to be introducing a divided self into the Phaedo and to pay insufficient regard to the dialogues unitary psychology then this is the price that one must pay for having it employ more than one type of diction: tailoring the types of diction to the relevant types of soul, as the Phaedrus would have it.
- Subject
- Socretes; Phaedo; Sibelius; ancient commentators
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1405936
- Identifier
- uon:35560
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783896657022
- Language
- eng
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