Plato Reading Guide

General Introduction: the Forms, the form of the Good; Plato's theory of Education and Ascent of the Soul; Plato's theory of the Reincarnation of the Soul

A reading guide for three excerpts from Plato’s dialogues: the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic VII, the Allegory of the Chariot Race in the Phaedrus, and the Myth of Er from the Republic X. This was written as a reference document for a class I’m teaching this spring, so it’s long and works through the material I covered with my class very slowly. Dm me (@gruidae_james) if you’d like PDF copies of the excerpts. All of them are in Cooper’s Plato: Complete Works.

The Theory of the Forms 

Opinion Versus Truth

First distinction: doxa (subjective or personal opinion) versus episteme (truth)

For Plato, we can know the truth, but we have to start by admitting that what we call our knowledge is really just opinion. In the Apology, Socrates claims that he knows he does not know and does not claim to know what he does not know. This is the meaning of the imperative to know thyself that is said (by Plato among others) to have been inscribed in the forecourt of the Oracle at Delphi (a temple dedicated to the Greek god Apollo). Self-knowledge is knowing the limits of your knowledge, and for Plato this self-knowledge is the first step in practicing philosophy. 

Philosophy as a Search for Wisdom

Etymologically, philosophy derives from the root words philia or love and sophia or wisdom. Translated literally, philosophy means the love of wisdom and the philosopher is one who loves wisdom. In contrast to the Sophist, or one who claims to have wisdom, the philosopher only seeks wisdom out of love for it. The philosopher is not one who is already wise but one who knows they are not wise and wants to be. This itself turns out to be a kind of wisdom, and for Socrates wisdom is the activity of seeking wisdom, seeking truth, seeking the Good. 

The Forms

Plato, following Socrates, claims that in ordinary or everyday conversation and disagreements, we do actually care what justice, for example, really is–to extend the example, it’s easy to say you don’t care about what justice really is until someone you love is being treated unjustly. For Plato, we are already committed to certain ideas about what things like justice, virtue, love, and friendship mean.

→ Example: Friendship. If someone who claims to be your friend betrays you or starts dating your ex without asking you soon after you’ve broken up, you might respond by saying “What the hell, you’re not being a good friend.” This means there is a criterion you are using, even if you’ve never written it down or had to talk about it before, that you use to distinguish between what makes someone a good friend and what makes someone a bad one (or what makes someone a friend or a non-friend). 

This criterion is what Plato calls a Form. A Form is a criteria or rule that helps us divide particular things, people, events, whatever into different kinds or categories (for ex., distinguishing between who we know belongs to the category friend and who does not). Forms, as rules (we could also call them norms), are not material things or facts. We cannot point to a Form in the world as we would to an object. Nevertheless, they are real. My idea of what makes someone a good friend has real effects on how I behave with my friends and my friends and I share a standard that we hold each other to–namely, we expect each other to speak and do certain things to be good friends (and to avoid saying or doing others). 

As rules for judging or dividing, Forms are transcendent to the cases that they help us distinguish between. This means that I cannot answer the question “What makes someone a good friend?” just by pointing to what my good friend is doing at any given moment. This is because even my best friend might say or do something that I take to be a violation of true friendship, and we might then have a conversation where I tell them they did not act like a true friend. 

This theory of the Forms gives us a threefold task: (1) to make explicit the Forms (rules/criteria) we already and implicitly use to make judgments in everyday life; (2) to compare and contrast our concepts and the concepts of others of what makes a true X (a true friend, a truly just government, etc.) in dialogue; (3) to criticize our own concepts and the concepts of others if we discover in the course of dialogue that one or each of us has a bad concept of what makes a true X. 

→ Example: After making explicit the concept of friendship I use as a rule to distinguish friends from non-friends and comparing/contrasting it with the concept my friend has of what makes a true friend, I might discover that I have a bad concept of what makes a true friend. I might not have taken into account that a true friend doesn’t date one of their friend’s siblings without asking if it’s ok first. I might also be told by a friend that other people who I think are my friends are, in fact, bad company because they encourage an addiction I have or I become a crueler person when I’m around them. 

The rules we use to distinguish between what makes a given particular a true X and what excludes them from being a true X can themselves be untrue or bad. Though we use these rules to judge different particulars, these rules themselves can be judged and found to be false or bad. We can have better or worse rules. Plato’s method is often called the method of division for this reason–we need to make explicit the rules we already use to distinguish particulars into what belongs to X and what doesn’t, compare/contrast these rules with the rules others use to make similar distinctions, and criticize these rules. 

This explains why Plato uses capitalization (like ‘Justice’ or ‘Good’ or ‘Self-control’ or ‘Beauty’) or the definite article the (‘the form of the Good,’ ‘the form of Justice,’ etc.) when discussing the Forms. We can always think we have arrived at the Form of friendship and be wrong, which means we have not reached the–the final, the ultimate–rule that helps us distinguish between who is and is not a true friend. ‘The,’ in other words, indicates that the goal of our knowledge is to know what true friendship, in this example, really is. We can contrast the form of friendship with a concept of friendship that we use as a rule: it is always possible that a concept of friendship we have at any given time is not the true concept of friendship. The task of philosophy, according to the theory of the Forms, is a constant process or activity of the examination of self and others in search of true concepts of the Forms. Philosophy is not an academic discipline for Plato but it does require the discipline of vigilant self-criticism. 

The Examined Life

In the Apology, Socrates calls this the examined life and he says the unexamined life is not worth living. Why? For Socrates, his fellow Athenians pretended to know once and for all what they did not know–that is, what constitutes a good life. This means that they not only caused harm to themselves, those they loved, and the city, but–because of their pride in claiming to know the truth of justice or virtue or the Good–actively resisted the attempts of people, like Socrates, who tried to get them to join the search for the truth. This is significant: it means that we are always at risk of living the wrong kind of life, of wanting to live a good life and thinking we live a good life but nonetheless being mistaken about what the good life truly is. It is possible to live an entire lifetime and have lived the wrong life. Neither Socrates nor Plato can tell you the five simple steps you have to take to live a good life, but they do invite you to search for what makes a true good life with them. This is the examined life, or the philosophical life: convincing people, by demonstrating that they do not yet have the final or ultimate truth (have not arrived at knowledge of the Forms), that they need to continue to search for the truth by examining themselves and others. In this way, Plato’s theory of knowledge transitions directly into his theory of education: (1) true education is directed at knowledge of the form of the Good (or the good life); (2) true education is not a process that ever ends, but is an activity we must constantly be engaged in in order to live wisely. In this way, acknowledging the limits of our wisdom, which compels us to search for wisdom, is the highest kind of wisdom we can achieve.

---

The relationship between the Forms and the Form of the Good

The form of the Good

The form of the Good is the form of forms or rule of rules. It is the criterion that allows us to select between which criteria we use to make selections (of particulars that belong or do not to a category) on the basis that some of these criteria (or concepts or rules) are good and others are bad. If the form of friendship is implied when we disagree with a friend about what makes someone a true friend, the form of the Good is implied when we begin to develop a better concept of what a true friend is in the course of this disagreement. That is, in this case the form of the Good helps us divide between bad concepts/rules of what makes a true friend and good ones. The Good is the criterion we use to judge all other concepts we have–do we have a good concept or good idea of what makes someone a true friend? In order to criticize our concepts of what the form of friendship is, to extend the example, we refer back to the form of the Good: do I have a good concept of what makes someone a true friend? Do I understand what it means to be a true friend yet?

Comparison between the form of the Good and other forms

Like the other forms, therefore, the Good is neither subjective (as a personal opinion) nor objective (like a fact), but is a universal. (‘Red,’ for example, is a universal or category under which we group particular objects to the extent that they are red, however we define red–by reference to the wavelength of light, for example, at any given time.) Like the other forms, the form of the Good can only be arrived at through examination of self and others in dialogue. 

→ Recall the threefold task: I get closer to the form of friendship when (1) I make explicit my implicit concept of what makes someone a (true) friend, (2) compare/contrast my concept/rule of what makes a friend with the concept/rule others use to distinguish friend from non-friend in a dialogue or disagreement, and (3) criticize my concept/rule for distinguishing friend from non-friend if, in the course of discussion, I learn that my concept/rule of friendship is bad or inadequate.

Conflict, for Plato, between different concepts/rules/norms in a culture or society is what forces us to seek the forms in the first place. Rosemary Desjardins explains:

If we lived in a totally stable society, one in which the traditions of our ancestors or teachers covered all contingencies, in which nov­elty posed no problems, then the guidance of traditional practices would perhaps suffice: we might not need those questions which cross-examine and challenge the inherited voice of the community. It is not clear that even in such cases there would be no questions, though there might well be less uncertainty. But in a society like that of Greece, or our own, we are being constantly called upon to make judgments; we need constantly to make decisions. Faced with new situations, we look for guidance to the practical and even lin­guistic conventions of society, only to find (often enough) that the conventions are in conflict. (Plato And the Good, p. 75)

The Socratic method (or method of elenchus), exhibited in many of Plato’s dialogues, involves Socrates asking questions to his interlocutors that force them to confront the fact that their concept or rule–of virtue, of piety, of justice, etc.–is inadequate or one-sided or partial in contrast to other ways of understanding that same concept or rule. Crucially, Socrates also attempts to reveal with these questions that the concept or rule does not produce good divisions–that is, it does not really help us, in the case of friendship, decide who is or is not a true friend. (For example: “Would a true friend start dating your ex without asking you if it’s ok?”) Many of Plato’s Socratic dialogues end in aporia or perplexity–a state in which the interlocutors finally know that they do not know and are ready to search for the truth. 

Contrast between the form of the Good and other forms

What we learn about the Good in the Republic outside of the Allegory of the Cave is that it is unique since, as Socrates says, it is that which is desired for its own sake and not for the sake of something else.¹ (Socrates contrasts the Good with pleasure to make this point: pleasure cannot be the goal of all human activity because we do divide between good and bad pleasures, or disagree about whether the concepts of pleasure we have are good or adequate.)² The form of the Good is, therefore, the end or goal of all human practices, which are all means to achieve the Good. It is consequently the end or goal of education. What makes education different from other practices is that it is a practice of knowing, so the end or goal of education is not only to achieve the Good–or live a good life–but to know the form of the Good and ask the question: What constitutes a good life? Just as Socrates will argue in Plato’s Apology that the highest wisdom humans can achieve is the search for wisdom (living the examined life), Socrates will argue in Plato’s Republic that to live a good life humans must not only try to live a good life based on the concept(s) they already have of what the good life is is but must actively search (in examination and criticism of self and others) for true knowledge of the form of the Good.

Philosopher-kings

In the Republic, Plato has Socrates and his interlocutors propose a new practice of education for the sake of teaching political rulers to govern a city justly. Socrates argues that in order for a political ruler, or king, to govern justly, they must be a philosopher–not someone who claims to know what justice is but someone who seeks to learn the true meaning (or form) of justice and govern their city using justice as a rule. So the philosopher-king isn’t a professional philosopher or scholar of philosophy, but someone who is engaged with others in a search for the truth of justice in theory and committed to creating a just city in practice.³ However, in order to decide between different, and competing or contradictory or mutually exclusive, concepts of justice, the philosopher-king must be able to tell the difference between a good and bad concept of justice. This means that the education of the philosopher-king has to be oriented towards knowledge of the form of the Good. Socrates says that it is only the one who seeks the truth of the Good–that is, to know the good from the bad concepts of anything based on a desire to know the form of the Good or what makes a good life itself–who can be trusted to run a city, since only they will not become comfortable by falling back on the beliefs or opinions they already have about what Justice truly is.⁴

Image of the Sun

Socrates tells his interlocutors that he will describe the Good indirectly, by reference to one of its offspring, drawing an analogy between the form of the Good and the sun: the sun is to the visible realm of things what the Good is to the invisible.⁵ (Recall that the Forms are not visible, tangible, or material things or objects even if they are real. We can’t hold in our hands the rules or standards we have of what makes someone a true friend, but we do expect others who we call our friends and who call themselves our friends to really behave according to those standards. In this sense, the Forms are invisible. They are ideas that are real, or ideas with real effects on our patterns of thought and behavior.) The light from the sun makes it possible for us to see and makes it possible for things to be seen.⁶ Likewise, the form of the Good makes it possible for us to know and possible for things to be known. Beyond possibility, however, Socrates explains that the sun is really the cause of visibility or sight: sunlight, whether reflected off of the moon or shining down during the day, causes us to actually see things. In a like manner, the form of the Good doesn’t just make it possible for us to know things, it causes us to know. In other words, we only desire to know anything at all–or learn or study things in the course of our education–for the sake of the Good, or for the sake of living a good life. In this sense, Socrates says the Good is the cause of knowledge and the truth. In true (or philosophical) education, however, the Good is also the object of knowledge and the truth. That is, in philosophical education the goal is to understand the Good, since the Good is the goal of all human activities.⁷ Or, as Rosemary Desjardins puts it, the Good is both measure and source–it is the implicit idea that drives us to evaluate our concepts as good or bad, true or false, in the first place (measure) and the desire that causes us to know anything at all (source).⁸

→ Digression on the status of universals: It is easier to make the idea that the Good is the most real of the forms and the forms are more real than the particulars we use them to divide and classify if we relate Plato’s allegorical and mythical presentation to an ordinary judgment: when a friend does something that violates our concept of what makes someone a good/true friend, we might say “A real friend would never do this to me.” In debates in Medieval philosophy, Plato’s philosophy was identified with the argument that universals are real or the fundamental reality (a theoretical position called realism) as opposed to the argument that universals are names we use to organize particular beings into kinds that, despite their use, have no true reality (a theoretical position called nominalism).

---

The Allegory of the Cave and Plato’s Theory of Education

Recap 1–the Forms

In previous sessions, we have established that, for Plato, the Forms are implied by the fact that in conversations (especially disagreements or conflicts) with others we 

1. Make explicit the implicit rules/concepts we use in ordinary judgments to divide particulars into kinds → what is the rule I use to distinguish between things that are of X kind and things that are not? What things are included as members of X kind? What things are excluded from X kind?

2. Examine or test our own concepts/rules and those of others → does the rule I use to distinguish between things that are of X kind and things that are not help me make good or accurate distinctions? Are there cases in which this rule fails to help me make good or accurate distinctions? How well does my rule help me make good or accurate distinctions in comparison/contrast to the rules that others use to distinguish between things that are/are not of X kind?

→ Example: The rule/concept of friendship that guides how one divides particular people between who is included in and who is excluded from the kind ‘friend.’ My friend might claim that I have failed to behave like a (true) friend in the case that I asked their ex out on a date without asking my friend first. A friend might claim that I cannot make good or accurate distinctions between people who are/are not my (true) friends because I consider some people to be my friends who are a bad influence on me–enabling my vices and/or undermining my well-being.

Plato argues that the discovery that our implicit rule/concept is inadequate when it is made explicit in conversation with others has the further implication that there is a rule/concept we can develop together that corrects for the errors of our previous rule/concept. As we have already established, for Plato we can always think we have arrived at the rule/concept for distinguishing between things that are/are not of X kind and, in our next conversation or disagreement, learn we were wrong. For Plato, this means we might have a rule/concept of X kind but still need to search for the true Form of X kind. This search, for Plato, is necessarily an interpersonal, collective, or social undertaking. It is conflict about our rules/concepts that drives us to have the conversations in which our rules/concepts are made explicit and, through critical examination, found wanting.⁹ The Forms are the true rules/criteria that, if known, would empower us to make good or accurate divisions of between particular things included in and excluded from the kinds they really do or do not belong to. Plato’s method is often called the method of division because it is, in the words of Socrates, concerned with ‘cutting at the joints,’¹⁰ for which Socrates provides the contrasting images of a clumsy butcher who ruins a piece of meat by cutting it where it resists division and a skillful surgeon whose scalpel cuts a body open only where the flesh yields itself to division without, therefore, destroying the tissue.¹¹

Recap 2–the form of the Good

If the Forms are implied by the explication of our implicit concepts/rules for dividing and the discovery that our concepts/rules are inadequate, the form of the Good is implied by our divisions between concepts/rules that are bad–or lead us to make divisions that are arbitrary and, as a result, unhelpful–and those that are good–or enable us to ‘cut at the joints.’ In what sense do we judge our rules/concepts to be bad or good? In light, Plato argues, of our desire to live a good life. As we discussed at the end of the last session, we are committed to understanding what it means to be a true friend because we take friendship to be essential to a good life; we are committed to understanding what it means to govern a society justly because we take justice to be essential to a good life. The Good, as Socrates says in the Republic, is that which is desired for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. The Good, he continues, is the universal end or goal of all human activity. We are all, consciously or not, already oriented towards the Good. That is why Socrates tells Glaucon in the presentation of the Allegory of the Cave that the premise of philosophical education is that everyone already has some sight of the Good but that they aren’t oriented towards it in the way that would allow them to see it clearly.¹²

→ Digression: Opinion (doxa) versus Truth (episteme).¹³ As we’ve discussed previously, the practice of philosophy draws out the significance of the conflicts between our opinions for the sake of redirecting us towards truth. Plato’s example in Republic V is the difference between the person content with their opinion(s) about particular beautiful things and the person who wants to understand the truth or true nature of Beauty itself. Socrates argues that someone with a ‘philosophic nature’ is someone who, for an whatever reason, already (and knowingly) desires the truth and is therefore also already more open to critically examine, to extend Plato’s example, their own assumptions that they know what it means to call something beautiful based on their experience of beautiful things. Recall that, for Plato, the Form can be said to transcend the particulars or cases that are subject to them. It is a mistake to answer the question “What makes something beautiful?” by pointing to a particular thing we already find beautiful. This is because the particular thing we point to that serves as a standard can always become something that is no longer beautiful. Plato’s second definition of opinion–in Republic VII–distinguishes it as a concern with becoming from knowledge as a concern with being. (p. 1149, 534a) This is crucial for Plato’s theory of philosophical education in the Republic. Socrates says that this is the difference between studying with your eyes and studying with your understanding; the difference between trying to learn the truth by studying objects of sense and the non-sensible (‘invisible’) rules/concepts that tell us whether a given object is truly of one kind or not. (p. 1145, 529a-c) In other words, a beautiful thing that can become otherwise cannot serve as a rule for what beauty is (in its being). If we want to know what it means for anything to be beautiful, we cannot be satisfied with any number of examples of particulars that merely can be beautiful (but don’t have to be), appear to be beautiful (but are not really beautiful), or are momentarily beautiful but can become otherwise (e.g., with the passage of time or a shift in one’s point of view). The Platonic critique of opinion is immediately political. In the context of Athenian politics, it was a criticism of the Sophists who, though being called teachers of wisdom, only ever taught the sons of the powerful how to appeal to the opinions the majority already had regardless of whether those opinions were good or bad, just or unjust.¹⁴ This makes philosophy dangerous. As Socrates says towards the end of the Allegory of the Cave, in a passage where Plato has Socrates foreshadow his own death, the philosophical educator who tries to free the prisoners by re-orienting them away from their opinions and towards the truth will, if he can be caught, be killed by the souls he tried to free. (p. 1134, 516e-517a)

Reading the Allegory of the Cave

Though all souls already have an implicit awareness of the Good and pursue it, Socrates (Republic VI) argues that philosophical education should target youth who have a ‘philosophic nature,’ or those who have souls that already desire to know the truth and are capable of searching for and knowing the truth.¹⁵ There is a long history of Plato’s readers arguing that he is a political elitist. This is because Socrates claims that though everyone can in principle make the ascent from the darkness of the cave to the light of the sun outside of the cave, not everyone will in fact make the ascent given the barriers that their natures (for example, if they seek honor or pleasure instead of wisdom) pose to their ability to learn and, as a result, the philosophical educator should focus on those whose natures are already more conducive or open to the ascent to truth. As we learn, the ascent is difficult and painful enough for those prisoners with philosophic natures who, even if they were suddenly released from their bonds, would still be compelled to stand up, compelled to turn to look at the light itself, and dragged by force up the rough and steep path out of the cave into the sunlight. (p. 1133, 515c-516a) It is only those who make the ascent that become philosophers and it is only those who have been initiated into philosophy–the conscious search for true knowledge of the form of the Good–who can also become philosopher-kings–compelled not only to search for true knowledge of the form of Justice but also to rule the city justly.¹⁶ However, there are oddly egalitarian moments in which Plato has Socrates argue that there is no reason to assume that children of rulers will have the appropriate natures to rule, that children not only can but will be born in the ruled classes who should be trained to rule because of their natures, and that there is no reason for women to be excluded from ruling if they have the right nature either.¹⁷ Keep this tension in mind as you read, especially given Socrates’ argument that though philosophical educators have the task of compelling only the best natures to make the ascent to the Good, the souls who have made the ascent and become philosophers must be compelled to return to the cave as kings to lead and liberate the other souls who remain prisoners. (pp. 1136-1137, 519c-520e) Justice demands that each class, through persuasion or compulsion, shares with the others the benefits they are uniquely equipped or trained to provide for the community of the city as a whole, regardless of whether this means that any one class isn’t as happy as it could be. (p. 1137, 519e-520a) In conclusion: Plato’s theory of education details a process in which philosophic natures are separated from the rest, compelled to make the ascent to true knowledge of the Good, and compelled to return to the cave to help liberate and govern those who remain prisoners for the sake of the city as a whole because Justice demands it. In the Phaedrus, we will see Socrates present an alternative theory of philosophical education through an encounter with the form of Beauty in the experience of love.

---

The Myth of the Chariot Race Around Heaven in the Phaedrus, The Myth of Er in the Republic, and Final Reflections on Plato’s Theory of the Soul

Introduction

There are a few barriers to reading Plato’s Phaedrus given that it presents a theory of the soul through two literary devices: an analogy between the structure of the soul and a three-part chariot team and a mythical allegory of the immortality of the soul in its pre-existence (that is, the existence of your soul before you, as a person with soul and body, were born), its fall from heaven, and its (possible) ascent or return to heaven. This allegory is recognizably a reincarnation myth. Plato derives this myth from several sources–the popular and literary tradition of Greek mythology, the influence of Asian religious and philosophical ideas felt in Greece at the time, and the theory of the transmigration or metempsychosis of the soul advanced by Pythagoras (an early philosopher and geometer/mathematician who also founded an ascetic religious cult). In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates give us a brief indication of Plato’s theory of the usefulness for myths for philosophical education when Socrates introduces poetic inspiration as the third kind of divine mania or madness. However, given that Socrates tells us he is compelled to make his second speech (the one we are reading together) to make “atonement for some offense against the gods” or impiety (pp. 520-521, 242c), turning briefly to Plato’s Apology can help us clarify what Plato means by piety and why, in the conclusion of this second speech, Socrates identifies piety with devotion to philosophical inquiry. (p. 533, 257a-b)

Piety (eusebia), or service to the gods, and Impiety (asebē), or offending the gods

In the Apology, Socrates is put on trial before the Athenian assembly (and, in the course of the dialogue, convicted and sentenced to death) on the charges of corrupting the youth and impiety to the gods. The charge of impiety is itself twofold: on the one hand, Socrates is accused of disbelieving in the gods for criticizing religious myths, poetry, and rituals; on the other, Socrates is accused of inventing or introducing ‘new spirits’ that are not accepted by the city’s cultural and religious tradition.¹⁸ By the latter, his accusers had in mind Socrates’ report that he was marked at birth by a divine or spiritual sign, or daimon, that never encourages him to do anything but speaks only to turn Socrates away from certain things he is about to say or do. (p. 29, 31c-32a) As we learn by the end of the Apology, Socrates’ daimon only opposes him when he is about to do something wrong–against himself, against others, or against the gods. (p. 32, 39e-40c) In the Phaedrus, it is precisely his daimon that prevents Socrates from leaving the spot near the river where he and Phaedrus are discussing love until he atones for his offense to the gods (pp. 520-521, 242b-d)–specifically since, in his first speech in the dialogue, Socrates foolishly and almost impiously disparaged love as bad in some way for being a kind of madness when, in fact, the madness of love is something divine. (p. 521, 242d-243a) As we know, however, Socrates’ second speech concludes by asking the god of Love to “convert [Phaedrus] to philosophy” (p. 533, 257b). How can philosophy be identical with piety when practicing philosophy appears to require the criticism of religious myth, poetry, and ritual? In the Apology, Socrates claims that it is his piety or service to the gods that demands the criticism of popular religious tradition (myths, poetry, and rituals) when people defer to the authority of this tradition to justify living unjust lives and avoid examining for themselves whether the ideas they receive from this tradition withstand the scrutiny of rational criticism (what Socrates calls ‘dialectic,’ or what we have called the method of division). In the Apology, Socrates appeals to the religious authority of the Oracle at Delphi (a temple dedicated to the god Apollo) to justify his practice of philosophy as a god-given task, one that he undertakes not only for the sake of his own soul but also, he claims, one that the god assigned him to perform for the sake of the soul of the city of Athens itself.¹⁹ For Socrates, the examined life as a critical examination of self and others every day about the truth of our concepts of virtue or justice or etc. is the greatest good and proof of his pious service to the gods.²⁰ As we will see, in the Phaedrus, Socrates not only uses mythical allegory in the service of philosophical education to compel Phaedrus to seek the truth by means of reason, but also recovers what he takes to be the rational meaning of several religious or mythical ideas.²¹ For our purposes, we will focus on three religious or mythical ideas that Socrates transforms into philosophical concepts in the Phaedrus: the immortality of the soul, recollection of the pre-existence of the soul (anamnesis), and the reincarnation of the soul.

1: Immortality of the Soul

Socrates begins the second speech with a proof of the immortality of the soul. (pp. 523-524, 245c-e) His argument is that the soul is self-moving, and therefore immortal, as opposed to the body or material things, which are moved and stopped by external motion. Socrates says that the soul, as self-moving, is the source of motion in the body.²² Unlike the soul, the body, as moved but not self-moving, is mortal in that it stops living when its motion is stopped. The fact that the soul is self-moving, however, means that it cannot also be something merely moved by external motion–it must be an original source of motion and therefore cannot have a beginning at one point in time like material bodies which are created/animated by external motion. Nor does it make sense to claim that the soul could be destroyed like the body is, since the body is destroyed when its (borrowed) motion is arrested from a motion external to it. According to Socrates, bodies only seem to move themselves because they are temporarily combined with a soul, a combination that cannot last forever because the body is, as established, subject to a destruction by external motion that the soul, as self-moving, is not. (This is also why it is false–and perhaps impious–to suggest that gods are immortal living things with both bodies and souls.) (pp. 524-525, 246c-d) The proof of the immortality of the soul in the Republic is more relevant to our purposes than the abbreviated proof (on the basis of the self-movement of the soul) we read in the Phaedrus. In Book X, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal given that the good and the bad for the soul–that is, our judgment of what is good/bad for the soul and/or what makes a soul good/bad–is not identical to the good and the bad for the body–that is, our judgments of what is good/bad for a body and/or what makes a body good/bad. The evil of a body, poor health or sickness, destroys it entirely (death). In contrast, the evil of a soul, injustice or other vices or wickedness, does not destroy it entirely. In other words, one cannot live beyond a certain threshold of bad things that happen to the body. There is a limit to how much the constitution of a body can change beyond which we can no longer judge it to be a good (healthy) body. There is, however, no clear limit to the evils that can corrupt a soul and people do live entire lives becoming worse (even extending their lives by living worse) as far as the quality of their character is concerned. Socrates says that the peculiar bad or evil of one kind of thing–in this case, the body–is not the same as that of another thing–in this case, the soul–and the bad/evil does not corrupt in the same way. (pp. 1213-1214, 608e-611a) We might object to Plato and argue that, in some cases, judgments of health/sickness and judgments of good/bad character are not so clearly separable. Not only do people occasionally judge the character of a person based on corruptions of their body–for example, judging someone’s character given their self-neglect or failure to care for their own health–but certain corruptions of the body also seem to change people’s characters–for example, someone’s character might change from a traumatic brain injury. There’s also the issue of mental illness. For Plato, would this be a corruption of the body, since the goodness of the body is health and the badness proper to it is illness? Or, if we agree with Plato’s distinction between the good/bad of the body and good/bad of the soul, would we be compelled to judge someone with mental illness as having a character corrupted by injustice? We cannot resolve these difficulties in this session, but for now, a qualified defense of Plato might go something like this: if judgments of the state of the body and judgments of the state of the soul (character-judgments) are not totally separable, we still cannot reduce judgments of the state of the soul to judgments of the state of the body. In fact, we refuse to judge people’s characters to be corrupted on the basis that they are sick or dying all the time. For example, if a loved one in your family suffers from dementia, would you change your mind about who they fundamentally are or were as a person on that basis? Plato’s answer is no, or that someone’s character or the state of their soul is not reducible to the state of their body. This is what he means by the immortality of the soul: the fact that someone is in poor health, sick, or even dead does not necessarily affect our judgment of that person’s character. Quite the reverse: if we do judge someone’s character to be unjust because their body unhealthy/sick or because they have died, we have failed in Plato’s view to recognize them as a person. Plato has Socrates argue against judging someone’s character to be unjust given their death in the Apology: we are all pursued by death and wickedness, and while the former catches all of us eventually, the latter can be avoided through the cultivation of virtue or excellence. (p. 34, 39a-b) It would be absurd to judge someone’s character to be wicked or unjust given the fact of their death, not only because it would require us to condemn everyone who has died or will die but because we judge people to be wicked or excellent (unjust or just) on the basis of how they relate to and distinguish themselves from others while they live. This is why Socrates claims in the Apology that “a good man cannot be harmed either in life or death,” since bodily harm–even to the point of being killed–does not destroy the state or quality of one’s soul. (p. 36, 41c-42a) Character-judgments are in that sense holistic and a response to the question: is X a good person? The relevant criteria for making character-judgments about the soul (psyche) for Plato are their behaviors, their relationships, their reputations, etc. that give us a sense for the unity of their life and the goodness or badness of their person as a whole.

2: Recollection

As Socrates develops his mythical allegory, he narrates the fall of the soul from heaven because of its poor performance in the chariot races with the gods–that is, the process whereby the soul loses its wings because the three elements of the soul (here: the charioteer, the spirited horse, the appetitive horse) are not harmonious with one another under the guidance of the rational element, a harmony which, in the Republic, Socrates calls the ‘pattern of justice’ in the individual soul.²³ Socrates claims in the Phaedrus that while the soul of every human being has seen Reality, or the invisible realm of the Forms (here he lists Justice, Knowledge, Self-control, and Beauty) beyond heaven, not every soul witnessed as much of Reality as the others while they raced in a circuit with the gods. (p. 527, 249d-250a) This is a consequence of the difference between souls that are well-ordered (or achieved the pattern of justice)–who at best, through intense effort, raised the head of their charioteer high enough to barely see Reality for a whole circuit or lap of the race–and souls that are poorly-ordered–who at worst, due to lack of self-control, were too distracted by their horses pulling them in different directions to see Reality without missing moments of it. These latter souls, rather than nourishing their wings with a proper diet of seeing Reality or the true, are left with only their own personal opinions of what Reality is to consume at the end of every race. Eventually, the wings of their soul grow too weak by being starved of Reality and shrink until the soul falls from heaven. (p. 526, 248a-b) Though all human souls have fallen from heaven (or else they would not be combined with a body) and all human souls have seen some of Reality (since souls who do not cannot be human, but only animal), it is this difference between (1) souls who were well-ordered enough to barely witness Reality for the duration of an entire lap of the race and (2) souls who were not well-ordered enough to witness Reality without missing moments of it that Socrates will use to account for the difference between souls that do recollect enough of Reality or the true to seek wisdom while they live in human form and those that do not. This should sound familiar from the idea of ‘philosophic natures’ in the Republic, where Socrates says that although all souls have an implicit awareness of the Good and pursue it, some are already oriented towards the Good (they already desire wisdom/truth) in a way others are not and can make the ascent to the Good more easily. In the mythical allegory of the Phaedrus, Plato makes the same argument when Socrates says:

For just this reason it is fair that only a philosopher’s mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine. A man who uses reminders of these things correctly is always at the highest, most perfect level of initiation, and he is the only one who is perfect as perfect can be. He stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine; ordinary people think he is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by god. (…) But not every soul is easily reminded of the reality there by what it finds here—not souls that got only a brief glance at the reality there, not souls who had such bad luck when they fell down here that they were twisted by bad company into lives of injustice so that they forgot the sacred objects they had seen before. Only a few remain whose memory is good enough; and they are startled when they see an image of what they saw up there. Then they are beside themselves, and their experience is beyond their comprehension because they cannot fully grasp what it is that they are seeing. (p. 527, 249c-250a)

In the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic, philosophical education is presented as the ascent of the soul to the Good through the art of dialectic or the method of division: compulsory re-orientation toward the Sun/Good; criticism of opinion (becoming, particulars) for the sake of truth (being, universal). In the mythical allegory of the pre-existence and reincarnation of the soul in the Phaedrus, philosophical education is presented as the re-ascent of the soul to Reality/Truth through recollection: encounter with Beauty through the beloved; self-discipline of the soul that keeps you oriented toward Beauty itself (or to truth) instead of enjoyment in the romantic/erotic experience of a beautiful person (or to pleasure).²⁴ Interestingly, Plato seems to hold that there is a significant difference between philosophical education that begins with a teacher forcibly re-orienting souls towards the form of the Good, which we know from the Republic is a painful and difficult experience, and philosophical education that begins with an encounter with the form of Beauty as it shines through its ‘image’ of the beautiful beloved, which involves a combination of mad ecstasy or joy when the lover is in the presence of their beloved and mad desperation or pain when the lover is separated from their beloved. (pp. 528-529, 251a-252c) Furthermore, Socrates even says that Beauty is unique among the other forms because it shines out through its material images more radiantly than the other forms (like Justice and Self-control). (pp. 527-528, 250b-c) What does this tell us about philosophical education? Are both paths–the Good as the Sun shining outside of and into the cave; Reality as the blessed vision of the host of the forms beyond heaven shining most brightly as Beauty through beautiful lovers–and both disciplines–the art of the dialectic and criticism of opinions; the work of recollection and the self-control required to distinguish the truth of Beauty from pleasure in beautiful things–equally effective? In what other ways does the model of philosophical education or the ascent of the soul differ between the Allegory of the Cave and the Phaedrus myth of the pre-existence and reincarnation of the soul? Finally: is everyone human capable of this kind of erotic love, or only the ‘philosophic nature’ whose soul, even when wedded to the material body, starts to grow wings because of its orientation towards the truth of the forms beyond heaven?

3: Reincarnation

In the myth of the pre-existence and reincarnation of the soul Socrates presents in the Phaedrus, the activity of the soul in heaven (the degree to which it is poorly-ordered) determines whether it is incarnated at all in a body and the activity of the soul on earth (the degree to which it is well-ordered) determines whether it is reincarnated into a better life or worse life or, finally, is allowed to make the ascent back to heaven and rejoin the race in the company of the gods and have the blessed vision of Reality.

Reincarnation in the Phaedrus: Socrates calls the law of Destiny the rule that a soul racing in the company of a god who catches sight of any true thing is safe from falling to earth until the next race (it could, in principle, always be safe it it performs well every race) but a soul that sees nothing true takes on a burden (ignorance, opinion) and its wings shrink until it falls to earth. The law further specifies that the first incarnation of the soul will be into a lover of wisdom or beauty (a ‘philosophic nature’) and all subsequent numbers of times a soul falls from heaven and is incarnated progressively result in worse fates on earth for the incarnated soul. That is, the less a soul sees of Reality in heaven the more likely it is to be incarnated into a life that makes it harder to recall what it saw of Reality in heaven while it lives. This is how Socrates generates the series of the eight lives or fates following the first incarnation: second–a lawful king or commander, third–statesman or head of a household, fourth–athlete or doctor, fifth–religious authority, sixth–poet or artist, seventh–manual laborer or farmer, eighth–sophist or demagogue, ninth–tyrant. (p. 526, 248b-e) Based on the human life most souls live on earth, they are judged: the unjust are sent to ‘places of punishment beneath the earth’ for a time to pay for the injustice they committed in their last incarnation; the just are occasionally elevated by their justice to a place in heaven for a time to enjoy a reward proportionate to their last incarnation. Only the soul of someone who practices philosophy or loves philosophically, however, can re-grow its wings and make the ascent to heaven–if they have chosen three lifetimes of philosophy or philosophical love in a row, after 3,000 years–more quickly than the others–who are eventually allowed back into heaven to race, after 10,000 years. (pp. 526-527, 248e-249c) Given the difficulty of choosing three of these of lifetimes (the philosopher; the philosophical lover), because of the effort it takes to cultivate a well-ordered soul in even one lifetime, Socrates calls living on earth ‘the true Olympic Contests.’ If both the lover and the beloved in a philosophical relationship of love can learn to cultivate well-ordered souls, or orient themselves towards knowing the truth of Beauty rather than enjoying the pleasure of beautiful things or people, they grow wings together much quicker than those who live other lives. This is the divine reward of the divine madness of love. (pp. 532-533, 256a-257a) This mythical allegory of great cycles of reincarnation that follow the soul from heaven to earth and back and forth again presents us with a problem of interpretation: if the narrative of recollectingthe pre-existenceof the soul is an allegory for a process of philosophical education through loving someone else the right way, for the sake of their soul and their life and the sake of your own soul and life, what does the narrative of the reincarnation of the soul allegorize?²⁵ We are justified in asking this question for two reasons. First, Socrates opens the second speech by counting poetic inspiration as a kind of divine madness to the extent that the poetry it produces is didactic. (p. 523, 245a) That is, the entire second speech and mythical allegory of the chariot races with the gods can be read as an effort by Socrates to put poetry in the service of philosophical education, to persuade Phaedrus, who has lovers and loves beautiful poetry, to search for the truth of Love and Beauty themselves through philosophy.²⁶ In that way, Socrates’ success in persuading Phaedrus demonstrates not only the proper use of poetic composition in education but also the truth that Beauty has a unique status among the other forms in that it attracts souls towards Reality and Truth with pleasure and joy. Second, Socrates calls his own speech an “image” or fiction, a “not altogether implausible speech” that “perhaps had a measure of truth in it.” (p. 542, 265b-c) Furthermore, he explains that this allegory had an educational purpose–to help both Phaedrus and himself divide (‘cut at the joints’) a lower or bad kind of love (pleasure-seeking in beautiful particulars) from a higher or good kind of love (wisdom-seeking towards Beauty itself).²⁷ (p. 542, 265e-266b) So what truth, knowable by philosophy, are we supposed to learn from the mythical allegory of the chariot races with the gods and cycles of reincarnation of the soul? To propose an answer to this question, we can return to the proof of the immortality of the soul at the beginning of the second speech–namely, that it is immortal to the extent it is self-moving, and therefore the state of the soul (just or unjust) is not reducible to the state of the body (healthy or sick) that is not self-moving but moved from without. As we established earlier, Plato’s argument is that judgments of character (or the state of someone’s soul)–i.e., are they a just or unjust person, excellent or wicked?–are not reducible to judgments about the state of the body–i.e., are they healthy or sick, alive or dead? What Plato suggests is that we not only can perform an abstraction that lets us reflect on and judge the soul independently of the body, but that we must if we are to treat other humans as humans at all–that is, as beings who can be good or bad, beings whose goodness or badness matters for themselves and for us (just as the state of our own souls matters for others in turn). Plato has Socrates make this explicit in the end of the Republic, which concludes with a different reincarnation myth, and to which we now turn.

Reincarnation in the Republic: The final moments of the Republic in book X are dedicated to Socrates’ presentation of another mythical allegory of the reincarnation of the soul, one known as ‘The Myth of Er.’ (pp. 1218-1223, 614b-621d) Though we will not be reading this allegory as closely together as we have read the Allegory of the Cave from earlier in the Republic and the allegory of the chariot races with the gods from the Phaedrus, it helps us advance our interpretation of the Phaedrus for two reasons: first, before relating the allegory, Socrates explains the way that myths of the reincarnation of the soul can teach us a philosophical truth; second, towards the end of the allegory, Socrates explains the significance of allegorizing the soul through myths for what it teaches us about how to live this life. How do myths help us learn about the soul? After the proof of the immortality of the soul Socrates gives in the Republic that we have already discussed (about the difference between what’s good/bad for or about the body and what’s good/bad for or about the soul), Socrates tells his interlocutor Glaucon that “to see the soul in its truth, we must not study it as it is while it is maimed by its association with the body and other evils–which is what we were doing earlier–but as it is in its pure state, that’s how we should study the soul thoroughly and by means of logical reasoning. (...) That, Glaucon, is why we have to look somewhere else in order to discover its true nature.” (p. 1215, 611b-d) This is significant because Socrates is arguing that to study the soul in its pure state through philosophical reason, it is necessary to produce a mythical fiction or allegory of the soul abstracted from its body and from evils (i.e., the evils of life, or the conditions that make it more difficult for a soul to become just and well-ordered) that allows us to learn something about the soul and its state (just or well-ordered; unjust or poorly-ordered) that we otherwise could not. As Socrates goes on to explain, only this process of abstraction can show us “what [the soul] would become if it followed this longing [for emulation of the divine] with its whole being” (p. 1215, 611e) or the consequences for the soul in this life given the degree to which it has cultivated itself and become well-ordered.²⁸ What does reincarnation myth teach us about the soul? Without getting caught on the details of the Myth of Er, we can compare and contrast the logic of the process of reincarnation presented there with the ‘law of Destiny’ in the Phaedrus. Given the law of Destiny, souls in the Phaedrus’ allegory of the chariot races with the gods were incarnated (falling from heaven to earth) depending on how effectively they could cultivate the order of their souls while in heaven, reincarnated into better or worse lives on Earth depending on how effectively they could cultivate the order of their souls in each life, and deincarnated (or returned to the chariot races) depending on how effectively they could cultivate the order of their souls for three human lives in a row (the best lives belonging to philosophers and philosophical lovers). The most significant difference between the logic of the process of reincarnation detailed in this allegory and the one detailed in the Myth of Er is perhaps that in the latter, there is no account of incarnation as a consequence of a previously disembodied soul falling from heaven or deincarnation of a previously embodied soul as it returns to heaven from the cycle of reincarnation into new human lives on earth. In the Myth of Er, there is no fall from or ascent back to heaven as a place where ‘souls in their pure state’ stand outside of the process of reincarnation (even momentarily, as no soul in heaven in the Phaedrus allegory is guaranteed safety in heaven if they fail to maintain the order of their souls in the races). Instead, each soul (after being punished or rewarded proportionate to how unjust or just their previous human life was) has to decide what their next human life or fate will be. This process is overseen by the Fates. The spokesperson of the Fates instructs a group of souls who have just been punished or rewarded that they are required to choose from a number of possible reincarnations laid out before them and lots will be drawn at random to decide the order in which souls from this group will choose from the available reincarnations (for ex., ‘models’ of different lives such as the life of an animal, of a tyrant, of a famous person, of someone beautiful, of someone rich, of someone poor, of someone with a good family, etc.). Importantly, the spokesperson concludes by saying each soul is entirely responsible for their choice. (p. 1220, 617d-618a) Socrates dramatizes the possibility that a soul makes the wrong choice as follows: the first soul picked at random to choose a reincarnation chooses what immediately appears to him to be a life of power, wealth, and success. He chooses without examining it, and so fails too see that mixed in with power, wealth, and success are a number of evils. This first soul chooses the life of a tyrant who is fated to cannibalize his own children. When the first soul realizes his mistake as he examines the life he chose, he is distraught and blames everyone but himself for his choice. (p. 1221, 619b-c) This, Socrates tells Glaucon, is the truth that reincarnation myths can teach us: 

Now, it seems that it is here, Glaucon, that a human being faces the greatest danger of all. And because of this, each of us must neglect all other subjects and be most concerned to seek out and learn those that will enable him to distinguish the good life from the bad and always to make the best choice possible in every situation. He should think over all the things we have mentioned and how they jointly and severally determine what the virtuous life is like. That way he will know what the good and bad effects of beauty are when it is mixed with wealth, poverty, and a particular state of the soul. He will know the effects of high or low birth, private life or ruling office, physical strength or weakness, ease or difficulty in learning, and all the things that are either naturally part of the soul or are acquired, and he will know what they achieve when mixed with one another. And from all this he will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to become more just, and ignoring everything else: We have seen that this is the best way to choose, whether in life or death. Hence, we must go down to Hades holding with adamantine determination to the belief that this is so, lest we be dazzled there by wealth and other such evils, rush into a tyranny or some other similar course of action, do irreparable evils, and suffer even worse ones. And we must always know how to choose the mean in such lives and how to avoid either of the extremes, as far as possible, both in this life and in all those beyond it. This is the way that a human being becomes happiest. (p. 1221, 618b-619b, emphasis mine)

In other words, the truth that reincarnation myths teach us is that every decision we make about how we should live to live the good life is a reincarnation. These decisions are informed by how we have already lived in the past, and by what we already take to be the good life, and these crucial decisions, once made, bind us by necessity to living one kind of life rather than another. In the process of living these lives we have chosen, we may realize that we made the wrong choice because we did not examine, through philosophy, whether or not the life we were choosing was a good life in truth or merely a good life in appearance. In the example of the soul who chooses a life of tyranny, we are told that he chose this life because, immediately and without examination of all this life would entail, it appeared to be a good life (with wealth, power, and success) but was not a good life in truth. The Phaedrus concludes, in fact, with a prayer Socrates offers to Pan (the god of nature) asking to be made beautiful inside, to live a life in which his material possessions do not disrupt the beautiful order he cultivates in his soul, to be able to judge others as excellent for their wisdom rather than their riches, and to have only as much wealth as someone with a just soul can have without compromising the order of their soul.²⁹ In his explanation of the lesson the Myth of Er teaches, Socrates argues that philosophy, or concern with the truth rather than opinion and cultivating the order of one’s soul to seek the truth, is what empowers us to make the right kind of divisions between lives that appear to be good but are not and lives that are good in truth. In the Myth of Er, the criteria or rule Socrates argues we should use to make decisions about the good life is the concept or form of Justice–the form that demands we cultivate the ‘pattern of justice’ in both our individual souls (as philosophers) and, to the extent we are capable, in the cities of which we are citizens (as philosopher-kings).

Conclusion

In both the Republic–in the Allegory of the Cave and the Myth of Er–and the Phaedrus–in the mythical allegory of the soul’s chariot races with the gods in heaven and reincarnation cycles on earth–we learn that the project of philosophical education or the ascent of the soul necessarily involves two things:

1. The cultivation of order in our own souls. In both dialogues, this requires practicing philosophy to distinguish between mere opinion based on particulars (e.g., particular beautiful things) and knowledge of the truth (e.g., Beauty itself). Philosophical education of the individual soul, in other words, compels you to abandon opinions and seek the truth.

2. The cultivation of order in the souls of others. In the Republic, the task of the philosopher-king, after establishing the pattern of justice in their own soul through philosophy, is to create a city or constitution on the pattern of justice through politics for the sake of the happiness of the city where they live as a whole. In the Phaedrus, the task of the philosophical lover is to respond to the madness of love–provoked by the image of Beauty in their beautiful beloved–by cultivating the order in their individual soul that allows them to control its appetitive element that seeks only pleasure for the purpose of developing a relationship with their beloved in which both lover and beloved teach each other and help each other live better, more just lives instead of merely using one another’s bodies for pleasure.

According to Socrates, this is the twofold mission assigned to him by the gods and, therefore, compels him to practice philosophy regardless of the danger or suffering he may experience as a result.³⁰ Desjardins explains Plato’s concept of piety as follows: 

As I understand it, therefore, the Platonic Socrates is affirming that, as human beings–that is to say, as soul sharing in the activity of the divine (...) we are called upon to care for, and through that caring to try to nourish and bring to fulfillment, the possibilities that lie hidden in the elements of any situation, whenever and wherever we are. (...) In other words, to be truly human means, through caring love, to try to bring about in our world that beautiful order that the god or gods bring about in the cosmos (remembering that in calling it the ‘cosmos’ we are calling it ‘the beautifully ordered’). (p. 160)

1. cf. “The Republic” in Cooper’s Plato: Complete Works, pp. 998-999

2. Ibid. p. 1126

3. Ibid. pp. 1100-1111

4. Ibid.: “Every soul pursues the good and does its utmost for its sake. It divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefit, if any, that even those other things may give. Will we allow the best people in the city, to whom we entrust everything, to be so in the dark about something of this kind and of this importance?” (p. 1126)

5. Ibid. p. 1127

6. Ibid. p. 1128

7. Ibid.: “So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either of them is the good–for the good is yet more prized.” (p. 1129)

8. Cf. Desjardins, Plato and the Good (pp. 108-116)

9. In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains that it’s because of his mission to know himself, following the order inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple to Apollo at Delphi, he is committed to learning not from nature but from other people in the city by critically examining them and, in the process, ostensibly learning about his own limits. (p. 510, 229e-230e)

10. Phaedrus (p. 542, 265e-266b): “This, in turn, is to be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do. In just this way, our two speeches placed all mental derangements into one common kind. Then, just as each single body has parts that naturally come in pairs of the same name (one of them being called the right-hand and the other the left-hand one), so the speeches, having considered unsoundness of mind to be by nature one single kind within us, proceeded to cut it up—the first speech cut its left-hand part, and continued to cut until it discovered among these parts a sort of love that can be called “left-handed,” which it correctly denounced; the second speech, in turn, led us to the right-hand part of madness; discovered a love that shares its name with the other but is actually divine; set it out before us, and praised it as the cause of our greatest goods.”

11. See Desjardins’, Plato and the Good, on the contrast between the images of the clumsy butcher (from the Phaedrus) and the skillful surgeon (from the Statesman). (p. 97)

12. The power to learn is present in everyone’s soul, and education takes it for granted that the ‘sight’ (implicit knowledge of the Forms, of the form of the Good) is there but needs to be oriented properly. (p. 1136, 518c-519b) Socrates and Glaucon proceed to discuss at length the appropriate subjects for the philosopher-king to be taught in their education and the proper style in which these subjects should be taught in order to try to isolate out what Socrates calls the easiest or most effective way to compel souls to be oriented towards the Forms and the form of the Good (using geometry as an example). (p. 1143, 526d-e)

13. For an extended contrast between opinion (doxa) and truth (episteme), see the end of Republic V (pp. 1102-1107, 476b-480a)

14. Republic VI: “Not one of these paid private teachers, whom the people call sophists and consider to be their rivals [viz., rivals of the philosophers] in craft, teaches anything other than the convictions that the majority expresses when they are gathered together. Indeed, these are precisely what the sophists call wisdom. It’s as if someone were learning the moods and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he’s rearing–how to approach and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most gentle and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what sounds soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through tending to the beast over a period of time, he calls this knack wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft, and starts to teach it. In truth, he knows nothing about which of these convictions is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, but he applies all these names in accordance with how the beast reacts–calling what it enjoys good and what angers it bad. He has no other account to give of these terms. And he calls what he is compelled to do just and fine, for he hasn’t seen and cannot show anyone else how much compulsion and goodness really differ. Don’t you think, by god, that someone like that is a strange educator?” (p. 1115, 493a-c)

15. All of the three natures (which correspond to the three parts of the soul–rational or wisdom-seeking, spirited or honor-seeking, and appetitive or pleasure-seeking) in the Republic will have matching capacities/powers and desires/motives on this model. (pp. 1107 -1110, 484a-486d)

16. In Republic V, Socrates introduces the philosopher-king as a ruler who knows how to philosophize and, therefore, design and implement the best constitution for a city. (p. 1100, 473c-e) See also Socrates’ image of two different kinds of captain of a ship: one kind of captain doesn’t know how to navigate but is very popular with the crew (a metaphor for the demagogue: one who acquires and maintains power by agreeing with the opinions of the majority, regardless of whether this is conducive for just governance) and another kind of captain who understands the art of navigation and can get the crew safely from one port to another regardless of his charisma (a metaphor for the philosopher-king: one who is concerned to know and implement justice, which may only be possible despite or in conflict with the opinions of the majority if those opinions are not just). (p. 1111, 487e-489a)

17. In Republic III, Socrates makes the first two arguments–that children of rulers are not guaranteed to have the right natures to rule and that some children born in the ruled classes can and will have the right natures to rule–in his explanation of the necessity of ‘The Myth of the Metals’ (or the noble lie). (pp. 1050-1051, 414b-515d) In book V, Socrates argues the fact that women are women is irrelevant to the question of whether their natures–that is, their desires and their capacities–are appropriate to be educated as rulers. (pp. 1078-1082, 450c-454e)

18. Socrates addresses both in his cross-examination of his accuser Meletus, who is, non-coincidentally, himself a poet. Socrates argues that Meletus’ accusation is itself contradictory: how can he believe in spirits, which are the offspring of the gods, without believing in the gods? (p. 26, 27c-28a)

19. In the Apology, Socrates explains that his criticism of the social values and religious traditions or myths of the city of Athens is itself a mission he was assigned by the god Apollo through the Oracle at Delphi. See Socrates on his interpretation of the Oracle’s claim that ‘no one is wiser than Socrates’ as the judgment that he is wiser than others only to the extent he does not think he knows what he does not know. (p. 21, 20d-21e) See also how Socrates claims he learned to interpret the Oracle’s words as a mission to prove that human wisdom–that is, the claim to already possess wisdom–is worthless by critically examining himself and others to initiate others (and continue on himself) to philosophy as a collective search for the truth and the good life. (p. 22, 22a-23b) In other words, for Plato-Socrates in this dialogue there is no difference between piety towards the gods and seeking the rational core of religious beliefs or mythical narratives. (Note that he is accused of impiety and corrupting the youth, the two charges that lead him to be put on trial in the first place.) It is in this sense Socrates says he was attached to Athens by the god (Apollo) to wake it from its slumber like an obnoxious gadfly rouses a horse from its sluggishness. (p. 28, 30e-31a)

20. See where, in the Apology, Socrates explains that he will not stop practicing philosophy to save his life because it would mean both disobeying the god (Apollo, see fn 5) and giving up on the greatest good because the unexamined life is not worth living: “Perhaps someone might say: But Socrates, if you leave us will you not be able to live quietly, without talking? Now this is the most difficult point on which to convince some of you. If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for me, you will believe me even less.” (p. 33, 37e-38a)

As Rosemary Desjardins argues in Plato and the Good, the second kind of divine mania, or mystical rites of purification, is the kind of piety Socrates considers his philosophical practice of criticizing himself and others to rid the citizens of the city of their ignorance: “Convinced that if there is to be health of the soul it must first be cured of self-deceptive ignorance, Socrates spends his life cross-examining both himself and his fellow citizens–an activity which the Sophist specifically identifies as healing purification.” (pp. 155-156)

21. For an extended discussion of what rational meanings or philosophical truths Plato recovers from the four kinds of divine mania presented in Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus, see Rosemary Desjardins’ Plato and the Good: Illuminating the Darkling Vision, specifically Chapter 5, “The Riddle: Euthyphro and Phaedrus.”

22. Socrates also claims the soul is the source of all motion in the material world, or “all soul looks after all that lacks a soul.” (p. 524, 246b-c). This is a claim we will revisit when we read Aristotle’s theory of the unmoved mover and active intellect but will pass over for now.

23.  Readers of Plato often identify Plato’s concept of the tripartite structure of the soul in the Phaedrus with Plato’s presentation of the tripartite structure of the soul in the Republic:

• In Republic VI, Socrates develops the analogy (p. 1008, 368e) between justice in a city (a well-ordered city that does not collapse into civil war) and justice in a single soul (a well-ordered soul that does not collapse into conflict with itself). Socrates argues that the pattern of justice is the same in each: an alliance between the rational element (city: the ruling class; soul: the part that seeks wisdom) and the spirited element (city: the warrior class; soul: the part that seeks honor) that enables the rational element to control and domesticate the appetitive element (city: the merchant class; soul: the part that seeks pleasure) and establish a harmony of the whole structure (city: a harmony between the classes; soul: a harmony between the three desiring elements). (pp. 1059-1076, 427d-443c) Socrates argues in Republic IX it will be the inability of the city or the soul to establish this pattern of justice among its three constituent elements that causes the chaotic political cycle or kyklos between different forms of constitutions–certain kinds of cities produce certain kinds of souls and those certain kinds of souls in turn produce certain kinds of cities. What this suggests is that for Plato it is not enough to establish the pattern of justice in a single soul, as the task of establishing this pattern in a single soul becomes so more difficult–even for those with ‘philosophic natures’ who might otherwise have established such a pattern in their own souls–for everyone in a city and under a constitution that is not just. This is why, in book VI, Socrates says that none of the present political constitutions in existence is “worthy of the philosophical nature,” since none is designed to cultivate the potential in its best citizens to live the examined life, establish the pattern of justice in their souls, and share their search for and knowledge of the truth of justice with the other citizens of the city by taking part in public or political affairs. (p. 1118-1119, 496a-497c) 

• In Republic IX, Socrates gives an image of this tripartite division of the soul that maps onto the division of the soul into charioteer, spirited horse, and appetitive horse in the Phaedrus: the many-headed monster or hydra (appetitive element seeking pleasure), the lion (spirited element that seeks honor), and the human (rational element that seeks wisdom). In this image, the well-ordered soul is one in which the human recruits the lion to its mission (seeking wisdom) and, in this alliance, domesticates the monster. (pp. 1196-1198, 588b-590d)

24. Socrates develops the distinction between souls who are inspired by the divine madness of love to (1) seek Beauty itself through controlling their appetitive element in their relationship with their beloved and those who (2) encounter Beauty through their relationships with beautiful people but cannot control the appetitive element of their soul and, consequently, are driven by the need for pleasure in enjoying particular beautiful people rather than seeking wisdom or true Beauty in a controlled relationship with their beloved. (p. 528, 250d-251a; pp. 530-533, 253c-356e)

25. One possible comparison we could make between the Phaedrus and the Republic is between the cycle of reincarnation of the soul, as the state of the non-incarnate soul causes incarnation and the state of the incarnate soul causes re-incarnation and de-incarnation, and the cycle or kyklos between different political constitutions in Republic IX, as the state of the city produces souls with certain states that in turn produce cities of certain states. Developing this comparison is beyond the scope of this session.

26. This is how Desjardins reads the Phaedrus in Plato and the Good. She argues that despite Socrates’ castigation of the poets–especially Homeric and Hesiodic myths and those who imitate Homer and Hesiod–across several books of the Republic (II and III especially), Plato criticizes poetry because these myths are not the kind of poetic compositions that educate the young in a philosophical way. This is why in the Republic Socrates objects to the content of these myths and their popular reception: (1) their content impiously misrepresents the gods and heroes as acting less than perfect; (2) they are received popularly as literal presentations of the divine rather than as allegories mean to indicate a truth. In combination, the impious content and literal reception led to Athenians referring back to the evil or imperfect deeds of gods and heroes, who served for them as ethical models, to justify their own evil or imperfect deeds in reality. (pp. 156-157) She argues that Socrates’ mythical allegory of the chariot race with the gods in the second speech in the Phaedrus is not only pious because it doesn’t slander the gods (and avoids the problem of reception because Socrates himself calls it a fiction rather than literal truth), but more importantly because it is meant to educate Phaedrus and lead him to live more piously in emulation of the perfection of the gods by taking up philosophy. (pp. 158-159)

27. Cf. passages in the Republic on the soul that is only a servant to pleasure–described (1) as the tyrannical soul driven to rule others to seek his own pleasure because he cannot control himself, willing to engage in the worst injustice to compensate for his disordered soul or spiritual lack (p. 1187, 579b-e);(2) as a desperate soul trying to have pleasure without pains or achieve the impossible task of filling a vessel full of holes (p. 1194, 585e-585c)–vs the Philosopher as one who knows how to experience the right kind of pleasures (the pleasures conducive to living the good life). (p. 1190, 582b-583a)

28. Socrates calls these consequences “the kind and quantity of wages” a just and virtuous soul receives from human beings and the gods (p. 1216, 612b-c) and “the prizes, wages, and gifts that a just person receives from gods and humans while he is alive and that are added to the good things that justice itself provides”–so that a mythical allegory of the soul abstracted from the body and the evils of human life shows us what both just and unjust souls “receive in full what they are owed” according to the argument advanced in the rest of the Republic that Justice is a good-in-itself. (p. 1217, 613e-614a)

29. “O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.” (pp. 555-556, 279a-c)

30. Connect the well-ordered soul (in the Phaedrus, the process of disciplining the appetitive part of the soul using the spirited part in service of the rational part–or, learning how to seek and enjoy the right kinds of pleasures given your orientation towards wisdom and seeking the truth) to Socrates’ comment in the Apology that the point of the examined life is to persuade people to care more about the state of their souls than their bodies or their wealth or their reputations: “Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: ‘Good sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?’ Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does care, I shall not let him go at once or leave him, but I shall question him, examine him and test him, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things. I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger, and more so the citizens because you are more kindred to me. Be sure that this is what the god orders me to do, and I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the god. For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for me, both individually and collectively.” (pp. 27-28, 29d-30b)