Phaedo Summary

Phaedo is an account of the final hours before Socrates’s execution in prison. It is told by Phaedo himself, a friend of Socrates who encounters Echecrates—a fellow philosopher—after having watched Socrates drink poison hemlock. Phaedo relates the conversation that took place between Socrates and his friends, who sat by him in jail as he argued for the immortality of the soul, among other things.

First, Phaedo explains, Socrates tells his friend Cebes to say goodbye to the poet Evenus for him, saying: “Wish him well and bid him farewell, and tell him, if he is wise, to follow me as soon as possible.” Hearing this, Simmias speaks up, surprised that Socrates would suggest that Evenus should hope to “follow” him to death “as soon as possible.” In response, Socrates says that any “man who partakes worthily of philosophy” should be “willing” to die. At the same time, he grants that it’s “not right” to take one’s own life. When Cebes asks how Socrates can believe that philosophers ought to embrace death while also scorning suicide, Socrates notes that in some cases it’s “better” to die than to live. However, humans belong to the gods, so it isn’t their choice to decide when, exactly, they die. In response, Cebes and Simmias voice another objection, saying that since the gods are the masters of humans, it doesn’t make sense for a person to look forward to death, since this would mean looking forward to losing the influence of a wise master. In turn, Socrates reveals that he believes the soul is immortal, which means a person doesn’t leave the service of the gods upon death.

Explaining himself, Socrates asserts that “those who practice philosophy in the proper manner” are preparing for death. To show how this is the case, he asserts that the body and soul are separate from one another. The corporeal world is full of distractions, he says, since physical senses are unreliable and can’t lend a person a dependable conception of reality. This is why “the philosopher more than other men frees the soul from association with the body,” ultimately using the soul to “grasp the truth” without interference from physical concerns. And since death is nothing more than the “separation of the soul from the body,” the attempt to live uninfluenced by the body is effectively a preparation for death itself.

Socrates uses the idea of the soul’s immortality to show his listeners that he need not fear death. In fact, he believes death will finally afford him the opportunity to find the wisdom he’s been searching for his entire life, since he’ll be undistracted by the whims of the body. His friends are impressed by his argument, but Cebes notes that most people believe the soul “disperse[s] like breath or smoke” when a person dies, adding that it takes “a good deal of faith” to believe that the soul will go on living without the body. Hearing this, Socrates addresses Cebes’s objection by referencing “an ancient theory” that living souls come from the underworld, saying that if this is the case, then souls must surely exist in the underworld, since they “could not come back if they did not exist.” As such, he claims that “the living never come from any other source than from the dead.” At this point, he suggests that things always come to be “from their opposites,” just as something becomes “taller” from having been “shorter” before, and vice versa. What’s more, he says that there is also a “process” by which something becomes its opposite, such that to become “taller” from having been “shorter” is known as “increase,” and to become “smaller” from having been “taller” is “decrease.”

Moving on, Socrates says that in the same way, life and death are opposites that “come to be from one another.” As such, “being alive” comes from “being dead,” and “being dead” comes from “being alive.” The processes that characterize these transformations are “coming to life” and “dying,” and Socrates says that these processes “balance” each other out. He then gives an example, saying that if there was no “corresponding process” to that of falling asleep, then everybody would go to sleep forever. By that turn, he says, if every human were to die without coming back to life, everyone would “remain in that state” of death forever, meaning that nobody would be alive. Cebes agrees with this, admitting that he no longer doubts the soul’s immortality.

Despite Cebes’s agreement, Socrates presents another theory for the soul’s immortality. Calling upon The Theory of Recollection, he explains to Simmias that humans never learn new knowledge. Instead, they “recollect” wisdom that their souls have acquired in past lives. Socrates puts forth that the soul has an understanding of the Forms—that is, unchanging ideas unbound by earthly variation. For example, when Simmias sees two similarly sized objects, he thinks of “the Equal,” even if the objects aren’t exactly the same. This, Socrates says, is because Simmias understands—by way of his soul’s previously-acquired knowledge—the Form (or idea) of “the Equal.” If such Forms “exist” and the soul has learned about them in previous lives, Socrates upholds, then “our soul must exist before we are born.”

Simmias accepts that Socrates has proved that the soul exists “before we are born,” but not that it continues to live after the death of the body. To address this, Socrates says that the Forms are “noncomposite” and unchanging, whereas physical things—like, for instance, humans or clothing—are “composite” (that is, made of multiple parts) and constantly transforming. He thus identifies two categories of existence: the “invisible” and the “visible.” The body, he says, is a “visible” kind of existence, the soul an “invisible.” Reminding Simmias and Cebes that the soul is able to attain wisdom if it rejects the whims of the body, Socrates asserts that the “invisible” category of existence is similar to that which is “divine” and “deathless.” Going on, he says that it is “natural for the body to dissolve easily, and for the soul to be altogether indissoluble.” In keeping with this, when people die, their bodies decay while their souls, if they have been made “pure” through wisdom, will “make [their] way to the invisible,” which is “divine and immortal and wise.” A soul like this will enjoy a wonderful afterlife amongst the gods, but if it has been too entangled with corporeal existence, it will languish in the underworld before coming back as an inferior being.

Both Cebes and Simmias admit that they have reservations but don’t want to “bother” Socrates with their objections, since he’s soon to die. Nonetheless, he urges them to voice their thoughts, so Simmias presents his issue with Socrates’s ideas regarding the visible and the invisible. He says that a person could “make the same argument [as Socrates] about harmony, lyre and strings”—namely, that “a harmony is something invisible, without a body,” while the lyre and strings that make that harmony are visible and physical. If one were to break the lyre, he says, the harmony would have to somehow continue to exist, at least according to Socrates’s view of immortality. This, Simmias says, is obviously illogical, since the harmony comes from the lyre and thus can’t exist once it has been destroyed. He asks Socrates how he might answer someone who sees the soul’s relationship to the body in a similar light.

Before answering Simmias’s question, Socrates asks Cebes to also voice his objection, and Cebes says that he has a hard time believing that the soul is immortal. To make his point, he compares the relationship between the body and soul to that of a weaver and his cloak. Throughout the weaver’s life, he fashions a number of cloaks, all of which eventually wear out. However, the cloak he weaves just before he himself dies will outlast him. “That does not mean that a man is inferior and weaker than a cloak,” Cebes says, adding that—in a similar fashion—it would be nonsensical to say that “the soul lasts a long time while the body is weaker and more short-lived;” just because the soul “wears out many bodies” doesn’t mean it will continue to do so forever, he notes. After all, it might go through multiple bodies but eventually perish along with one of them.

Considering Simmias and Cebes’s objections, Socrates appears grateful, since they’ve given him a chance to clarify his meaning. He then turns his attention to Simmias’s notion of the soul as a harmony, reminding him that he previously agreed with The Theory of Recollection, which upholds that the soul exists before body. This, he points out, means that the soul isn’t a harmony produced by the body, since it has already existed on its own. Simmias agrees with this, but Socrates adds another point: a harmony can never contain “wickedness,” since “wickedness” is an instance of “disharmony,” and a thing can never be both itself and its opposite at the same time.

Moving on to Cebes’s objection that the general resilience of the soul doesn’t prove its immortality, Socrates turns his attention to “the cause of generation and destruction,” a matter he used to think about quite a lot as a young man. Wanting to know why things are the way they are, he adopted the author Anaxagoras’s belief that “it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything.” However, Socrates says, he soon saw that this theory is unsatisfactory, since Anaxagoras doesn’t really use “the Mind” to determine the “cause of everything,” instead using unreliable physical and earthly observations. So, Socrates explains, he developed his own theory, which explains the nature of existence by suggesting that a thing is the way it is because of its adherence to certain unchanging Forms. To describe this, he says: “It is through Beauty that beautiful things are made beautiful,” suggesting that Beauty itself is a Form. This leads to his final argument for the immortality of the soul. To begin, he says that nothing can be itself while also being its opposite. What’s more, he argues that something that “brings along” a thing will never “bring along” the opposite of that thing as well. Therefore, he concludes that because the soul “brings along” life, “the soul will never admit” death, since death is the opposite of life. As such, the soul must be “deathless.”

Having made his final argument for the soul’s immortality, Socrates tells his listeners what he thinks happens in the afterlife, explaining that the souls of pious people make their way to a “pure dwelling place” where they’re unencumbered by bodies. Others will be “purified” for their wrongs until they’re able to return to earth in a different body, and still others will be thrown into the worst reaches of the underworld, never to return.

Wrapping up his vision of the afterlife, Socrates drinks poison hemlock, walks around his cell to allow the poison to circulate through his body, then lies down as his friends weep. He tells them to stop, because there’s nothing sad about his journey to the afterlife. Just before dying, he turns to his friend Crito and utters his last words: “Crito,” he says, “we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.”