Discussing "Phaedo," Or "On The Soul," By Plato

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "Phaedo," which is one of the dialogues of Plato, who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The cover art for this episode is Plato as depicted in a portion of the oil painting The Death of Socrates, which French painter Jacques-Louis David completed in 1787.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Various Positions On The Immortality Or Existence Of The Soul
• 10:30 Context
• 12:44 The Balance Of Pleasure And Pain
• 15:10 Philosophy As Preparation For Death
• 17:05 The True And The Useful
• 18:43 Nihilism And Consumerism
• 20:30 Plato's Roadblock
• 25:55 The Danger Of A Valid Premise And An Invalid Inference
• 28:37 Moderation And Licentiousness
• 31:05 Pre-Birth Knowledge And Forms
• 33:39 The Invisible And Unchanging And The Visible And Changing
• 34:56 A Definition Of Wisdom
• 36:08 The Greatest Evil In Experiencing Violent Pain Or Pleasure
• 37:32 Closing

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. This week we're going to be talking about another dialogue of Plato. This one is called Phaedo. It's also sometimes called on the soul because it deals with arguments for the immortality of the soul. And this is a topic that people often have a pretty clear idea about one way or the other. You might subscribe to a religious belief, so you believe that the soul is immortal or you might have decided you're an atheist and what goes with that is that the soul is not immortal, though that doesn't necessarily follow. You could not believe in a God, but still believe that some part or aspect of humans continues on in some way even after what we call death. Or you might be uncertain, but lean in a certain direction. You might not have a particular framework for it, but you feel like there's something else after death. Or you can kind of lean in the other direction, which is where I am, and think that it doesn't look like there's anything after death. But there's all kinds of things that don't appear to our senses or even to our logic and yet they are nonetheless real. Never mind that we now have devices that can measure things that are outside of the spectrum of what humans can perceive both in light and in sound and in vibration. There are frequencies of light and sound that we cannot sense, but it's trivial to measure them using various devices. So you can't entirely rely on your senses for this question. You can't say, well, I've never seen a soul or something that I would call a soul and therefore they must not exist. Though I do think it's reasonable to work from the opposite direction and say I've never seen a dragon either. And I cannot be certain that there are no dragons just because I haven't seen one. But I've never seen one and I've never seen any evidence of one either. And by the way, if it sounds at any time in this recording like there's a baby in the background, it's because my daughter is here at her little table next to me. I'll do my best to get any of her Plato commentary out afterwards, but some of it may have to stay in. So working from the senses and saying I've never sensed anything that I would attribute to the afterlife or to an eternal soul. You can't thereby completely rule out the possibility, but you can say, as I do, that I've never sensed anything like that. So I'm going to count that against this position. And you can get into reasoning and you can say, well, it seems like other animals are also terrified of death. They really want to avoid death, but we don't assume that they have a soul. So why should we assume that humans do just because that would be more convenient for us? But at the same time, though, we will point out the various ways in which many animals have a level of emotion that most people don't expect. Elephants mourn their dead. There are birds that will assemble twigs and stuff in a way that's not functional. It's not a nest, but it's very deliberate. If the scientists then come and move some of the twigs, the next day the bird will come back and put them as they were, which looks a little bit like animals doing art. All kinds of animals above a certain size and level of complexity play in one form or another. If you have animals at your house, I'm sure you've observed other things. We have cats and actually now we have three cats, which is really too many. We had two and then there was a situation in which a third one needed a home. And so now we have three cats. And with three cats, you can really start to see some of the complex social stuff because there's not only one relationship between two cats. Is it good or bad? But with the third cat, there's now three relationships and those relationships affect each other. And you can see aspects of these animal relationships that you would normally only expect to see in human relationships. Like, for example, if two of them are playing together a lot, the third one will get a little jealous. But so animals have these capacities that you normally wouldn't expect them to have if you haven't observed them. And we usually attribute that kind of thing only to humans. And so then you could argue that the line between humans and the other animals is blurred if it exists at all. So why would you expect that humans have a soul if the other animals don't? But you can take it a step further still and say that animals might have these brains that are advanced in this way. But nobody would say that animals have the advanced abstract reasoning, for example, that humans have. They may have emotions and social relations, but they cannot mentally manipulate abstractions. Or if they can do that to some limited degree, they can't do it the way that humans can. And not to say that therefore that's what the soul is. If humans have some aspect of themselves that other animals don't have, then they could just as easily have a soul while other animals don't have a soul. And that's not my position, but I could see how somebody would argue that. And there's another limitation of logic in general. And I'm sure there's a philosophical term for this problem, but I've never encountered it. But if you imagine somebody who was born in midtown Manhattan, and until they were 40, they never left Manhattan. And they had never seen any records.including the accounts of other people who had been off of the island and heard their stories about what other places are like. So they've never seen anything except Manhattan and they've never seen any evidence of any other kind of place. They would assume that the entire universe looked like Midtown Manhattan, or at least the entire earth. They would know what a tree was, but not really a forest because Central Park is not a forest. There would be all kinds of things that they could not imagine because they had only ever seen the types of things that characterized their existence. And they would assume that the rest of the universe is the same way. Now if we expand that not to a physical environment, but a logical system, or a way that the universe behaves, we might imagine that it's entirely possible that we say logically it works out like this, and this follows that, and therefore there's no eternal soul. Even if you could make that kind of argument, that assumes that the logic of our world can be expanded to absolutely everything that we can sense and that we cannot sense and that might exist in some other unknown way, which would actually be an illogical move. It's entirely possible that our entire universe operates based on one logical system, which we have not completely sorted out, but from which we know how to draw certain invalid inferences and how to criticize other types of inferences as invalid, that we know something about the logic of our universe the way that somebody could know something about the flora and fauna of a given forest, but it doesn't necessarily follow that all of existence outside of our universe, if such a thing exists, would also follow the same logic. It's possible to imagine something that is outside of the logic of the universe that we inhabit. This argument doesn't really keep me up at night, but if we're being thorough, just as something can be beyond the reach of our human senses and we can only measure it with technology, it may be possible that something is beyond the reach of our logic or that somebody designed it to be so. A word I've heard used in this area, I think, is pronounced fideism and that's sort of related to this. The idea that faith is simply beyond reason. It's not something that's reasoned out. You don't believe something because it's logical. You believe it. You have faith in it, maybe in the face of it being illogical because it's beyond that. If you imagine that a god would want to test his creation by insisting that they have faith, that they not believe because it's self-evident, because then otherwise everybody would simply believe and there would be no significant differentiation between believers and non-believers in the god. If that god were to create a sensual wall and say, I'm not going to make it completely apparent to the senses that there is a god and I am he, he could create a logical wall in the same way and say, no, I don't want you to reason your way to believe in me. You need to access it from somewhere else, some compartment in your soul or something. Now, I have trouble imagining why a god would set up his universe that way, but if you think of stories like Flatland, if you haven't read Flatland, it's a very interesting little short allegory that helps to illustrate dimensions beyond three. And one of the things that happens there is that it starts and there's a two-dimensional space and the two-dimensional triangle or whoever the main character is, all the characters in the story are just shapes, is visited by a sphere, by a three-dimensional shape. And the way he appears is that the triangle sees a point in his room, in his house, and then the point expands until it almost fills up the whole room. And then the shape retracts again and becomes a point and disappears. And the reason that happens is because if you imagine a sphere passing through a two-dimensional plane and what that would look like to the other shapes on that plane, it would look something like that. And the triangle is totally bewildered by this event. And then the sphere starts talking to him, I think, and it's kind of as if an angel is talking to him. And the story isn't really about religion, but when I think about things like that, and then I say over here, I'm not sure why a god would want you to be able to access something not by your senses and not by your reasoning. He wants you to get at it somewhere else. I'm not really convinced by that, but I also cannot rule out the possibility because like the triangle, I may just have a totally limited perception of the ultimate reality. And whatever else may be true, that is certainly true. We are able to perceive and even measure with technology and reasoning a pretty limited band of what's going on in this universe. And I wanted to begin with some of that, not because I'm proselytizing for Socrates or Plato's view of the soul here, but I know for me that when peoplestart talking about the afterlife, my natural response is to slowly stop paying attention. And here, Socrates is going to talk for a while about more the soul than the afterlife. And whether you think there's an afterlife, you could still be concerned about the deeper part of yourself that Socrates is talking a lot about here. So, if you believe in an afterlife, you might find that a lot of what Socrates is talking about here in the 4th century BC may align with some of your beliefs. If you don't, there is certainly still a lot to get out of this one. So, now we can get into it. This one, as I mentioned, talks about immortality. It talks about forms, which are generally taken to be Plato's ideas. And scholars think that this one does reflect Plato more than Socrates because some of what is said here is a bit different from the Apology, from Euthyphro. And it's more similar to, as we will hopefully see, the Symposium, the Republic, and some of the other dialogues that are attributed more strongly to Plato's influence. And the context here of the dialogue is still following the death of Socrates. In Euthyphro, he was getting ready for his trial. He was trying to talk to Euthyphro about what piety was. In the Apology, he was at the trial defending himself, explaining and justifying what he was doing. In Credo, he's in prison. He's been sentenced to death. His friend Credo comes and tries to convince him to allow him and the others to bribe the jailers and so they can run away. Socrates insists on staying because to do otherwise would be unjust. And now in Phaedo, Socrates is about to be executed, but he's having one last conversation with his students, though he's very humble towards them. At one point, he calls them my judges, meaning Socrates is making his argument to his students, and he has no expectation that they're just going to believe him because he's Socrates or even because he's about to die. He still approaches them as people who completely need to be convinced by his argument. They are his judges. There's no assumption that they're going to agree with what he says. And they were engaged in this dialogue as they always had been. And sometimes they're laughing because Socrates makes a joke, but then at other times they're crying because they know he's about to die. And it mentions a baby of Socrates by his wife, Xanthippe, X-A-N-T-H-I-P-P-E. Apparently Socrates actually had three sons by her, but she's totally distraught and freaking out. And so pretty early on, he sends her and the other women away. And then later the executioner has given him the poison and Socrates is about to drink it. And the guys around him are getting emotional and Socrates chastises them. He says, come on, this is why I sent the women away so I could have a quiet death. Don't you guys make a bunch of noise now. And he uses the bonds that were on his legs to talk about how pleasure and pain go together, that they often balance themselves out in one way or another, even if you don't know how to notice that. But he had these bonds on his legs, these chains, and they were hurting his legs when they were on him. But then the jailer comes and takes them off and his legs feel much better and he's rubbing his legs and it feels nice. And he talks about how there's now an equivalent pleasure that follows after that pain. And some people might look at an idea like that and say, well, that's rather Pollyanna. Sometimes things happen that are just terrible. And I wouldn't say that this is a one-to-one correlation, that as if in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, that every pleasure will give you an equivalent amount of pain and every pain will give you an equivalent amount of pleasure. But generally, if you look for this, you'll see there are a lot of examples of it. You could talk about how drinking alcohol is fun when you're doing it. And if you don't drink enough to get hung over the next day, you still have a little subtraction from your health because you did that. You would be a tiny bit healthier if you hadn't drank that alcohol. And then there are other things that are not as widely known, but if you look into them, they're definitely there, that apparently alcohol sort of burns out your dopamine while you're drinking it so that you have extra fun then, but it can cause you to have decreased dopamine levels the next day. Now, I wouldn't say that anything that decreases your dopamine is bad and we should always be trying to maximize it. I'm just pointing out that this thing that it increases initially, it literally decreases later, apparently, according to some research. So this is exactly the kind of parallel gain and loss in pain and pleasure that Socrates is talking about. And then the reverse is true if you do a good workout, it's often pretty unpleasant when you're doing it, but then as a result, you're healthier, you feel better, you're able to do more. We could find many examples of this, but those are two easy ones. And at one point, Credo tells Socrates that the executioner says that people who are going to be executed should not talk too much because then they get heated, their body gets worked up, and then they have to take the poison in two or three doses in order for it to have its effect. And Socrates says, well, then he better be ready to give it two or three times.And Credo says I knew you'd say that but he's been bothering me for a while So Socrates says kind of as he did in the apology ain't no way I'm gonna stop talking now So you better plan accordingly and later he says something that I'm not sure if this is the origin of it But it's certainly the oldest example I've seen he says quote the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death now if this is true it would be strange indeed if they were eager for this all their lives and Then resent it when what they have wanted and practiced for a long time comes upon them end quote so this idea that Philosophy is about learning how to die properly and this is usually used in sort of a stoic context to mean that Philosophy helps you to endure everything to be patient to accept the circumstances of this mortal life Against which no one has recourse and I do think that is mostly the message that Socrates has here that Plato has here But since it comes pretty early in a long argument about how the soul doesn't actually die at death I wonder if the actual message here is not a little bit different It's not be manful and calm in the face of your own annihilation But you don't really need to worry about that Anyway, because the soul survives death and I also worry that it verges a little bit on being the doctrine of a kind of death Cult because sometimes what Plato is saying here seems to be that death is kind of the point death is the culmination of certain things of a process of spiritual purification or at best it can be if you devote your life to the proper objects as we're going to get to Plato's idea has a bit to do with trying throughout your life to purify your soul by being concerned with philosophy and with virtue and Seeking to detach your soul from the body from the concerns of the body so that at death It's not much of a loss for the soul to become completely detached from the body because it was already halfway there Anyway, and I think that's a useful way of thinking about death But I don't know if I think that's true and true and useful are of course not the same thing But if something is true and useful, that's very good If it's not true, but useful then that's something and if it's neither true nor useful Then you basically ought to chuck it, but I wouldn't say that something that's useful But not true is the top tier of these kinds of thoughts But it's not the bottom either if we're trying to put these in a hierarchy and if you're dealing with really pure Philosophy or pure mathematics, then you can say that all that matters is what's true But if you're dealing with the whole culture, it can be worth it to think about memes that are useful but not true and whether atheists want to accept it or not I think it's pretty much certain that the belief in hellfire has kept many people in line Over 2,000 years not only in Christianity, but in Islam as well It didn't keep everyone in line, of course But there are people who would have behaved more badly But for fear of hellfire, and if you think hellfire is real Then that's an example of something that is true and useful But if you don't think it's real then this might be an example of something that's useful But not true and maybe there's an argument to be made for doing more harm than good. That might be the case I'm just using it as an example in that limited way And if we look at this doctrine of seeking to purify the soul of the attachments of the body throughout one's life Because that would be useful in the passage and death into some other world Socrates argues that this is true not only useful though He somewhere acknowledges that he can't know for certain But it's much easier to argue that this or something like it is a useful way to look at your life But Plato uses his ideas about forms to argue that the soul is immortal and at one point he talks about the weakness of the Senses and then he says quote is it not in reasoning if anywhere that reality becomes clear to the soul end quote and that's a Perilous move and I've got it here somewhere. Hopefully we'll get to it He goes even further than that in a way that I think actually was kind of a big problem for a long time But if you acknowledge the weakness of the senses It does not logically follow that reasoning is therefore the better way to access Truth that reality becomes clear to the soul through reasoning rather than from the senses It might be true that the senses are flawed and you have to be very careful with them And so is reasoning or it's very easy to play tricks on yourself with words in a way that doesn't reflect anything in super verbal reality outside of words and as I was reading all this I Wondered whether atheism is Promoted and encouraged in various ways as I think it is I'm an atheist, but I can see that that is the position that's encouraged in movies and in television But it makes one wonder whether atheism is cultivated in part because a belief in the afterlife and afinal accounting of deeds, in a sense, is, among other things, bad for the economy. It inhibits consumerism, for one thing. It makes you less concerned with stuff that you can buy, and more concerned with the state of your soul, whatever you decide that means to you. Whereas, the nihilism that is often presented as accompanying atheism can be used to stoke that same kind of consumerism, and it makes you wonder how much atheism would be encouraged if it conflicted with certain interests, rather than aligning with them. And I think I actually have that passage I was thinking of right here, or maybe it's a pair of passages, so I'll read it first, and then we can talk about it. Plato writes, quote, he will do this most perfectly, who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from the eyes and ears and in a word from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it, end quote. So he starts out with this spiritual and moral doctrine about how at death the soul separates from the body, and that's why throughout one's life it's good to distance oneself from bodily pleasures, not only for that reason, but this is part of why it seems wise to do that, because it's a course of action that connects to something eternal rather than something earthly and temporary. And then he points out how the senses are flawed and how we can misperceive things. And then he pairs those two things together and makes this argument about accessing knowledge or truth and says that the only way to do that, he will do this most perfectly, who approaches the object with thought alone. He says, do not associate any seeing or hearing with the object, just reason about it because the reason is the thing associated with the soul, which is pure and eternal, and the senses are associated with the body, which is temporary and flawed. I have a good friend with whom I haven't spoken in a while, but we would sometimes talk about philosophy and a phrase that we came to was lies that rhyme. And maybe we've talked about lies that rhyme on this podcast before, but lies that rhyme are ideas that have some kind of symmetry, or maybe they literally rhyme, or they fit in the mind in a certain way. They're easy to remember, but they're simply not true. And if you watch out for lies that rhyme, you'll notice some, maybe you have some that are very foundational in your thinking, I probably do. But I think that this right here is a lie that rhymes, and this is a big one. And it might just be because I'm looking at this from a certain time period with a certain ideology, not a political ideology, but an epistemological ideology, a way that we think about knowledge and how knowledge is developed. But you have right here, and I think in at least one more passage that we're about to look at, a big solid Jersey barrier sitting smack in the middle of the road to empiricism and experimental science. Now you could argue that experimental science is a dead end, or we should never have started doing it, or it only gives us the illusion of knowledge in a certain way. If you have that position, you have to articulate it because if you don't, all of the modern world and all of our understanding or our claimed understanding of how the universe works is based on using the senses along with the reason to access reality. And this clever pairing of a spiritual morality with an epistemology, I would say is a lie that rhymes. And I don't know how much Plato was read in antiquity after his time and in the middle ages. I know that Aristotle was read in the middle ages a lot, but I'm not so sure about Plato, but this framing could easily have held up experimentation for a thousand years. If this idea and its influence spread, that the only way to access reality is to completely ignore your senses and purely reason about it. So Socrates and Plato might've been very wise, intelligent, thoughtful guys, and very capable as individuals, but I would argue this idea right here did a lot of damage to the long-term historical development of human thought. And again, I'm looking at it from my 21st century perspective and our 21st century epistemology that uses a lot of experimentation. And perhaps the final accounting of experimental science will be negative, not positive. And that we would have been better off to just keep reasoning about things. But if we place any value on modern science, this idea and ideas like it got in the way. Later, Plato writes, quote, as long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil, we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth. The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture. Moreover, if certain diseases befall it, they impede our search for truth, skipping ahead only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord, and battles, for all warsare due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body, and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth. And all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy. Worst of all, if we do get some respite from it and turn to some investigation, everywhere in our investigation the body is present and makes for confusion and fear so that it prevents us from seeing the truth." So that's more compelling. This is all stuff that Sextus Empiricus gets into. I have an episode about him. He's one of my favorite writers of all time, but he goes into what Plato is talking about here in a lot more detail, especially how certain effects on the body affect our perception. If we're hungry, we perceive things a different way. If we're sick, if we're tired, if we're young and strong, if we're old and weak, there's all these ways that our perceptions can be very easily warped, and that's all completely true. However, it does not then follow that reason is then the way forward. This is why logic and studying valid inferences matters so much. We are so often deceived by a valid premise and an invalid inference. Somebody brings up an important point and then they draw an illogical conclusion from it. You have to be very careful. You have to hold onto your wallet because somebody can make a strong point that you really agree with, and then they can make a move that sounds correct. And because you're maybe a little bit fired up emotionally by the validity of the premise of the posed problem, you're more likely to go along with the inference, but the inference might be invalid. So Plato is making a very valid point about the weakness of the senses, and then he makes an invalid move, I think, to therefore do not use the senses in the pursuit of truth. And this second passage, the one that I just read, has a lot of other good stuff in it, the other moral problems of attachment to the body. It needs wealth, and so we have to spend time earning that wealth, and also sometimes we go to war in order to get the wealth, and all these things are getting in the way of the search for truth. And that's all valid too. These are ways that the needs of the body can get in the way of the search for truth, but you still can't move from there to rejecting the senses completely. And this is the scary thing about reason. The only way that we know that that's an invalid move is because we have the history of science behind us. If we were Plato in the fourth century BC, and we were looking at all these facts about the limits of the senses, and the needs of the body, and the strife that that causes, and either we then came to that conclusion that the body is really an obstruction to truth just across the board, or if somebody else articulated it, it would be very easy to be pulled in by that. It sounds very convincing, but it happens that the better approach is you have to build little models that you can replicate, and that you measure what all the parameters are in order to surpass the limits of your senses, and to try to check them in certain ways. That's the actual way forward. And the scary thing about reason is that when you've arrived at a bad conclusion, it doesn't necessarily feel bad. It can feel good. You can feel like there's a kind of symmetry to it. We looked at this in Poincaré. He would sometimes feel that there was a connection between two mathematical realities, and that connection would feel very symmetric and harmonious and beautiful, except that when he went to go check the math, it turned out that it wasn't actually true. Sometimes he did find harmonious connections in that way, but sometimes he would have in a flash an idea that there might be a connection between these two things, or that there is, but then when he went to work out the math, he would find that there isn't actually such a connection. But it would have felt nice if there was, so this is why reason by itself is actually very perilous. Later, at one point, he describes moderation as, quote, not to get swept off one's feet by one's passions, but to treat them with disdain and orderliness. And it reminded me of a comic that I saw in a newspaper in the late 90s, probably, and it shows a guy climbing up to the top of a mountain and meeting a wise man sitting there. And the guy asks the wise man, what's the secret of life? And the wise man says, moderation in all things. And the guy thinks for a second, and he says, well, what about love? And the wise man says, what do you want from me? And the idea is that he's trying to give this general rule, and the guy comes and finds an exception to it. And something about that cartoon seems very 90s to me, because I think the joke there is that you should have unconditional love for all things, that your love should be immoderate. And I think that's a bad ideal anyway. But also, the ancient Greek idea of moderation, at least based on this definition from Plato, didn't refer to giving a controlled or limited amount, like not eating too much or not drinking too much. But it was this idea of not getting swept off one's feet by one's passions, but to treat them with disdain and orderliness. And I think that very easily applies to love also, that you shouldn't be swept away by your love. But we'd also have to look at what word was meant by passions, because Socrates might have said moderation doesn't apply to love at all, because what I'veI mean by passions is whatever that word is that's sometimes interchangeable with appetites. It's talking about something more carnal. And on a related note, he gives a definition of licentiousness, saying that licentiousness is being mastered by pleasure. The word licentious is often used to mean somebody who's very interested in sex, but Plato is using it or some word that the translator translated as licentious to refer to anyone who is mastered by pleasure. And then he talks about how some people are moderate out of licentiousness. They keep away from certain pleasures because they are overcome by others. And I guess he would say that that's a kind of false moderation. If you control your desire for certain pleasures in order to achieve other ones, then that's not real moderation. That's still licentiousness. That's being moderate out of licentiousness. So if you keep a very strict schedule and you wake up early in the morning and you get to work and it's because you love money, then you have overcome a love of comfort or rest because you are mastered by a love of money, Plato would say, which is not the same as a general subjugation of the appetites. It's a selective subjugation of them. And later he talks about things coming to be from their opposites, that what is asleep wakes up, what is awake eventually falls asleep. And he says, therefore, there's a process of dying from life and coming to life from death. And he gets to something that I think Kant must have read because he talks about when we see something similar, if we see an object, we know the new object by our recollection and knowledge of the similar object. And we compare and comprehend the new object in that way. And he says, quote, before we began to see or hear or otherwise perceive, we must have possessed knowledge of the equal itself if we were about to refer our sense perceptions of equal objects to it. So he's saying we must have had some notion of the equal. And he's talking about the form equal. He's using a capital E in equal. So the abstract notion of equalness, we must have had a concept of that in order to perceive any object because we would have had to compare it to something else. And he starts to say that we must have received this knowledge before birth. And I mentioned Kant because this seems sort of related to a priori and a posteriori categories of knowledge, stuff that you can know from reason alone and stuff that you can only know from sensed experience. This is moving in that territory. And Plato then moves from there, from this pre-birth knowledge of the equal to say that knowledge of all forms, of the good, the beautiful, the just, the pious, must have been in us before birth. This is his argument. And at one point he says, quote, a man who has knowledge would be able to give an account of what he knows or would he not, end quote. And Simeon says that, yes, he would be able to, but I would say, no, not necessarily. In fact, in most cases, if somebody asks you, what do you know about this topic? Some things will come into your mind, but you don't even necessarily know what you know about something. If somebody says, list as many European cities as you can, and you list them off until you can't think of any more. And then they say, what about Bucharest? And you didn't say Bucharest, but you say, oh yeah, of course, Bucharest. You knew that city. They didn't just teach you what Bucharest was, but you weren't able to give an account of your knowledge of European cities. And this isn't really a linchpin to what we're talking about, but I just give it as an example of when you're reading Plato or anything, I find, I try to go slowly to try to see if each thing that he says really follows, because you'll encounter something that doesn't necessarily follow, or it's debatable, or you might have to have somebody give a better explanation of what is meant there, because it's not immediately obvious. But then he starts to build this structure where you have on the one side, the invisible and the unchanging, which refer to the soul and to forms, this concept of Plato's. And then on the other side, you have the visible and the changing, which are connected to the body and the particular. So he acknowledges that forms are invisible by definition, as is the soul, but they do not any less exist simply for their being invisible. And reading about that made me think how interesting it would be if our souls were visible to one another, and how that would make people work more hard on their souls. That would make an interesting short story that if you do something unjust, it physically changes your appearance somehow to make you more ugly. And if you do something just, it makes you even more beautiful and handsome, not only to the opposite sex, but you have a kind of radiance that everybody can see. Probably somebody has written a short story or a novel like that, but that would be an interesting concept to explore. Because in that case, people would be much more concerned with the state of their souls, if they were visible, if other people could see them. And for me, I'm using soul as a kind of placeholder for the state of your virtues and vices and the degree to which your thoughts, words and actions are determined by one or the other. We don't have to believe that the soul is immortal to be concerned about that. And he gives a definition of wisdom, which unfortunately in this context has to do with.this distance from the senses. He says, quote, When the soul investigates by itself, it passes into the realm of what is pure, ever-existing, immortal, and unchanging. And being akin to this, it always stays with it whenever it is by itself and can do so. It ceases to stray and remains in the same state as it is in touch with things of the same kind. And its experience then is what is called wisdom. End quote. And he asks that as a question, but it's kind of a statement. So he's saying wisdom is when the soul investigates without the senses, and it goes into the realm of the pure, the eternal, the immortal, the unchanging, that is, Plato would say, the world of forms or the realm of forms. And it ceases to stray and remains in the same state since it's in touch with other things that are fixed. And he says, that's wisdom. And I think there's something there. I think there's something in wisdom that has to do with the connection to the eternal, but combining that with parameters for pursuing truth will at least make what we call science very difficult. It'll make it impossible, as we've talked about. And I've got another two pages of handwritten notes, but I'm just going to show you one more passage here that I liked from this one. Plato writes, quote, violent pleasure or pain or passion does not cause merely such evils as one might expect, such as one suffers when one has been sick or extravagant from desire, but the greatest and most extreme of evil, the one does not reflect on this. Skipping ahead. That the soul of every man, when it feels violent pleasure or pain in connection with some object, inevitably believes at the same time that what causes such feelings must be very clear and very true, which it is not. Skipping ahead. Every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so it believes the truth is what the body says it is. And skipping ahead one more time. The soul of the philosopher achieves a calm from such emotions. It follows reason and ever stays with it, contemplating the true, the divine, which is not the object of opinion. End quote. So, when you feel pleasure and pain, Plato would say, the greatest evil is that you think that the source of that pleasure or that pain, the source of that feeling, you think that you know what it is. It feels very real, but you don't even know that. So, you are in a misconception. You have some conception about what is hurting you or what is making you feel good, and you don't even know that clearly. So, an evil or Socrates or Plato would say the worst evil that comes out of this is that misconception. You think you know something that you don't know, but I'll leave it there. And that's what I've got for 2024. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for sticking around this year, though I took a long break. When I look back at what we looked at this year, I'm very happy with it. I think we looked at a lot of really interesting books, and I'm looking forward in 2025 to doing even more. So, I hope you and your family had a very merry Christmas. I hope you have a happy new year. I hope 2024 was a good one for you. Any year is bound to have some ups and downs, and some years are all up or all down. Either way, we can hopefully all be humble in our triumphs and steady in our defeats. And again, I thank you very much for listening, for joining me up to this time. I hope you'll continue to do so in 2025 as we go on exploring some of the great works from the European literary canon and the culture, history, philosophy, science, and art that surrounds it. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.