Teaching and the Decline of Liberty at Credulity and Curiosity in A ...

Man and Nature in Plato's Phaedo 175
divine and pure and monoform truth and will join the gods has been posited. The
existence of this separate realm of changeless truth is quite problematic itself, as
has been pointed out already.
In the second half of the Phaedo,
all the diverse strains of the first part discus
sion of soul are pulled together. Everything is brought into focus around the issue
of the nature of the truth grasped by philosophy. Philosophy's truth is openly ad
mitted to involve knowledge of generation and decay and the inquiry becomes
concentrated on the body -soul interaction, moving away
soul separation of the apology and noncomposite soul sections.
PHILOSOPHY'S REALM
from the rigid body-
For a short time again at the center of the dialogue, the momentum comes di
rectly from Simmias and Cebes. They insist on unraveling
the Penelope-like fab
ric that Socrates has just woven for the soul (cf. 84a-b) his nurture of belief in
the monoform, changeless nature of the individual soul. Each suggests an alter
native model of causal interrelationship between body
and soul. In Cebes'
age, soul is the weaver of body, soul's cloak; yet the individual soul can weaken
and die (86e-88b). In Simmias'
im
image, soul is like a harmony produced by the
instrument of the body, necessarily dispersing as soon as the body dies
(85e-86d). Simmias intimates that the body and soul might be produced by
some demiurge(s) (86c).
Simmias has reopened a number of issues. The nature and recollection argu
ments taken together had offered a possible explanation of the generation of living
beings without recourse to any sort of separate demiurge. However, the presenta
tion of the body -soul dichotomy
in the noncomposite soul section opened the
way to new answers. Some ruling and invisible demiurge(s) is now available to
account for the ordering in the whole available not just as a mythic tool or
playful conjecture, but as an actual philosophical explanation. Socrates describes
this philosophic
"attack"
against his arguments in grand Homeric terms (89b-c,
95a-b), for philosophy and truth have replaced every other arena wherein battles
of value might be played out.
Socrates pauses to make clear that if what Simmias says is true, virtue is not
possible for human beings (cf. 92e-94a). Aspects of the arguments of Simmias
and Cebes are then united and transposed into the language of Anaxagoras, the
philosopher who gave definitive expression to the possibilities inherent in the
body-soul division. As cause of generation and decay and origin of living be
ings, Anaxagoras posited vovg, which, he said, existed originally as a separate,
all-alike, all-knowing or determining force that produced the order of the physi
cal whole.7
why
Later vovg came to be mixed in with some things which explains
these things have life. Virtue and choice become just as problematic on
7. Simplicius Phys. Fragment 12, 164,24 and 156,13 or Kirk and Raven, pp. 372-73. Also,
Simplicius, Fr. 17, Phys. 163,20, wherein Anaxagoras denies that qualitative change takes