More on Phaedo

As faithful readers may remember, on December 12th I commented on an argument in Plato's Phaedo, under the more contemporary inspiration of Anderson Brown.

Now I think I may have grasped a point that puzzled me then. For when Socrates is challenged with the idea that the soul may be a sort of harmony, and thus dependent upon the physical instrument that plays it, his response is to contend that this can't be a good analogy. Why not? Because having a soul is a binary choice: you either have one or you don't. Being harmonious, or melodic, though, is a matter of degree. Some tunes are more tuneful than others.

Setting aside Brown's exegesis of the passage, I found the argument weak. It appeared to be a mere playing with words. Surely, a defender of the soul-as-harmony theory could say that we sometimes use "harmony" in a binary sense, while at other times using it as a matter of degree. Indeed, as a music critic might use the word "soul" in writing of R&B musicians, it is susceptible to a matter-of-degree interpretation too.

But perhaps Plato's point is two-fold. First: if we think of the tune Mary-had-a-little-lamb as a Platonic Idea (as Plato presumably would have), then we will think of the first musician ever to have played that tune on whatever instrument -- or the first composer ever to put it to paper -- not as its creator but as the discoverer of that bit of imaginative space.

Second, though, there is a sharp distinction. The soul is that which does the discovering. A particular tune is that which is discovered. They are as different as subject and object.

Plato is then saying that (a) both tune and appreciative soul can exist in some sense without embodiment, but (b) the soul exists in a fuller, more active, sense than the tune. The soul is that which rejects one tune for another, deciding that one is more "tuneful" than the other.

I'm reminded a bit of something Wittgenstein said about the self. My self would not be part of the contents of a book called "The world as I found it." The self is the finder.

T.S. Eliot

Eliot prefaces "Four Quartets" with two of Heraclitus' epigrams.

Eliot, in his dare-to-be-obscure way, gives only the Greek. I'll give only the English.

"Though the logos is common, most men live as if they had a private source of understanding."

"A road is, upwards and downwards, one and the same."

Wisdom for the 21st century, surely.

Eliot cites Diels for these fragments. Hermann Alexander Diels was an inexhaustible German classicist who collected all the "fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers" as transmitted to us by later writers, and supporting materials.

Diels' three volumes have become the source for all subsequent students of philosophers from Thales to Protagoras. From "everything is water" to "man is the measure of all things," scholars footnote such sentiments to Diels. And so Diels secured his own measure of immortality by helping to transmit and organize this wisdom (mixed, as all human wisdom is, with folly, but wisdom still.)

Diels, in short, helped bring the earliest philosophers out of the realm of the "private understanding" of an elite into that of the common logos.

Heraclitus would have smiled, while stepping only once into a river.