When I first began reading The Soul by Phaedo my initial thought was, 'oh great, two guys talking in prison. The only way this will be mildly entertaining is if they make a movie adaptation where they cast Will Arnett to star opposite Dax Sheppard in a fun journey filled with toilet wine, baby ducks, and way too much testosterone (Like this). Unfortunately for me, this was not the assignment. As I began reading Phaedos account of his last encounter with Socrates, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not all greek to me. (Pardon the bad pun). I actually found this reading extremely fascinating. For those of you that weren't fortunate enough to be in the group that read this, but still want to expand your minds, I recommend swinging on over to D2L and checking it out. It brought out a lot of interesting, although not at all original thoughts, that really caused me to stop and think about them seriously for the first time. As soon as I'd get set in agreement with one concept, Socrates would contradict himself and completely make me think otherwise. This is also a great read for anyone who has wondered what bipolarism feels like. The first concept that caught my attention, was of course, about the human soul. The philosophers, namely Socrates, believed that death was not an end to life, but simply the point at which the soul separates from the body. He believed that the body was weak and hampered the souls ability to learn. Because the body had worldly desires beyond knowledge, such as sexual desire, desire to nourish itself, sleep, pleasure, and so forth. Because of these desires, regardless of their necessity, the soul is prevented from reaching absolute knowledge on earth (64 D). Only by the soul separating from the body (dying) can a soul lose its boundaries to learn, therefore philosophers do not fear death, but welcome it. To me, this makes sense because the philosophers never seemed to 'live to the fullest' as many other people did, and still do because they knew it would only hamper their ability to learn. Just as I began to agree with this point of view, as I'm sure many of you reading this have, Phaedo poses this question to Socrates: if the gods are truly good masters as he says, why would a wise man want to leave the good master, when he knows he could not take better care of himself (62 D). This too made sense to me; if philosophers believe that the ultimate knowledge is to become in sync with god, then why would he want death to approach quickly, where god cannot guide him? I won't quote every contradiction, because they constitute 90% of this reading, but it really caused me to experience what the followers in Socrates day and age experienced. The philosophers would say one thing, the government would say another, but both made perfect sense although they contradicted each other. To put it into lamens terms, think of posing this question to two groups of people: which came first, the chicken or the egg? One group will tell you the chicken of course, because it had to lay the egg. There have been millions of chickens for thousands of years laying eggs. The egg came from a chicken, thats all there is to it. This may make sense, because after all, every chicken egg has come from a chicken. Have you ever seen an ostrich lay a chicken egg? No? Didn't think so. The other group however will say, of course the egg came first. The chicken didn't just plop out of the sky one day and began laying eggs. There were other creatures that over time transformed, generation after generation, and one day when a similar creatures egg hatched, a chicken came out. You now get to thinking about it, and this theory too makes sense. Chickens, after all, do not just plop out of the sky. You personally may favor one theory or another, however the question is a trick. It is not a question meant to be answered, but one to be contemplated. It is a question of whether or not the audience believes in creationism or evolution. However, it is not presented as a question seeking an opinion, but a definite answer. This is what Socrates was trying to explain to Phaedo in the cell: not every question has a definite answer, some take contemplation and observation from both stances. Although the chicken and egg theory wasn't in the reading, I find it the best way to explain the philosophers. They were not looking for a definite answer, but were looking for the meaning of the question. I thoroughly enjoyed this reading because it really caused me to think hard about my stances on many of (Socrates') common day issues.
May I say, if i were the professor, I'd ignore the time of the post. I love the Titanic reference. And cracked up at the "Lets go to Prison" link. As far as the reading, I agree. I have seen it with my own group (Justice) as well. If something so large and so abstract could be defined so easily, it wouldn't be either of those things. People have to come to their own conclusion which forces them to think about those things in the first place. If there was an easy definition as to what was honest, for example, I would never think about the topic of honesty. All of the work would be done for me.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post! I always love pop culture references!
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