COMMENTARY ON GERSON

ALESSANDRA FUSSI

Professor Gerson's paper is in many ways challenging and illuminating. His detailed interpretation of the Phaedo is meant to offer a non question- begging argument on behalf of moral absolutism.1 Accordingly, in the first part of the paper the problem of moral absolutism is addressed in the early dialogues in general and in the Gorgias in particular. In the second part we find an elaborate argument proving that the Phaedo offers a theory of the self that supports Socrates' absolutist claims. In such a theory incarnate souls are merely imperfect images of eternal models. Professor Gerson maintains that the ideal self is nothing but "a knower, self-reflexively contemplating the Forms with which he is cognitively identified" (cf. p. 252). His argument runs as follows: in the early dialogues Socrates claims that it is better to suffer than to do evil. However, it can be objected that suffering evil entails of course suffering pain, while doing evil does not. If I think it is in my interest to take whichever course of action minimizes my pain, I have no reason to accept Socrates' thesis. In fact, my overall interests would be better served by doing, rather than suffering, evil. The question then is: how are we supposed to assess different views of what constitutes human interest? Professor Gerson rightly points out that Socrates cannot merely be claiming that moral absolutism is just a matter of personal preference. He must be claiming that people can be wrong about their own interests. Even if all Athenians disagreed with Socrates, he still would say that they do not know what their true interests are. As Professor Gerson argues, "since most people literally cannot distinguish themselves from one of their possessions, namely their bodies, they mistakenly believe that their interests are the interests of bodies. When someone says, for example, that it is in all cases in his interest to avoid pain, he is assuming that he is a body, not a soul" (p. 233). Socrates, on the contrary, "must be presuming that a person's interests must be psychic because a soul is what a person is" (p. 233). If this is the case, then those who take the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain to be their highest interest turn out to prefer the care of their possession (their body) to the care of themselves (their soul). Pleasure and pain of course are

I Professor Gerson stated that this was the goal of his paper in the version he read. In the revised version this remains the implicit goal of his interpretation of the early dialogues as well as of the Phaedo. problematic, because they can be seen both as affections of my body and as affections of my soul: "my bodily pleasures and pains are states of me, unlike ordinary possessions which belong to me but are not me" (p. 234). Professor Gerson observes that the early dialogues presuppose that I am my soul, but in the Crito and the Apology Socrates remains agnostic about the immortality of the soul. However, an argument for the immortality of the soul would prove that the soul is the real self and is disembodied. In the Gorgias' myth of the final judgment we find the first instance of the claim that the soul is immortal. Professor Gerson argues, however, that only the Republic and the Phaedo fully articulate the conception of the disembodied self still implicit in the Gorgias. The Phaedo offers a strong argument in support of the absolutist claims of the early dialogues, because it excludes pleasure and pain being affections of the true self. This argument would be compelling if the Phaedo, the Gorgias and the Republic shared the same overall account of the soul. The texts, however, do not support such a claim. Let me turn to the Gorgias first. While it is true that in the Gorgias Socrates claims that care of the soul has to be our primary goal, his view of the soul is different from that presented in the Phaedo in two important respects. First, as Professor Gerson observes, in the Gorgias the body is far from being regarded as a useless hindrance. Gymnastic and medicine, which aim at the good of the body, play an important role in the dialogue. They are contrasted with pseudo-arts like cosmetics and cooking, which aim only at pleasure and gratification while ignoring the body's well being. They are also taken as models for the true care of the soul. As medicine is to justice, so is gymnastic to legislation. In turn, pseudo-arts like cosmetics and cooking are associated respectively with sophistry and rhetoric. In the Phaedo, Socrates' request to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius is in keeping with the overall view of incarnate life as a sickness from which death delivers us. In the Gorgias health, though by no means the highest good, is a good to which we can reasonably aspire, as the overall stress on medicine indicates. The second and more relevant difference is that the Gorgias, unlike the Phaedo, ascribes pleasures and pains to the soul, not to the body. In the Phaedo Socrates identifies the soul with the thinking part of ourselves, and hence sees reason as our "true self," while ascribing desires and passions to the body. In the Gorgias, Socrates speaks of the soul as consisting of both reason and £7TL8v}J.la, appetite. If appetite is as much part of my soul as is reason, and if I am my soul, then I cannot possibly justify the claim that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong by maintaining that pleasure and pain do not really affect my true self because they are affections of the body. In