The Ethics and Moral Psychology of Plato's Phaedo Douglass Reed

The Ethics and Moral Psychology of Plato’s Phaedo Douglass Reed West Greenwich, Rhode Island Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, University of Rhode Island, 2004 Master of Arts in Philosophy, Virginia Tech, 2008 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Virginia December 2015 2 Acknowledgements This dissertation owes its existence to my adviser, Dan Devereux. His enthusiasm and support for the project gave me the confidence to pursue the puzzles I found in the Phaedo. And his comments and questions on drafts gave me the resources to argue for solutions to these puzzles. Dan’s generosity with his time and his insights was superhuman. I will always look back fondly and appreciatively upon our conversations about the issues I consider below. I also want to thank the other members of my dissertation committee: Tom Brickhouse, Jim Cargile, Jon Mikalson, and Walter Ott. Special thanks go to Tom and Walter for reading and commenting on chapter drafts, to and Jon for his insights on the Greek. In addition to my committee, I want to thank Dominic Scott for conversations on the dissertation and for initially suggesting to me the possibility of focusing exclusively on the Phaedo for the project. Many of my fellow graduate students also helped along the way, none more than Matt Duncan who commented on an early version of the first chapter and was always enthusiastic and willing to talk about the dissertation. Finally, I owe Jenny Reed my deepest gratitude. Not only was she patient, supportive, and extremely helpful with drafts, I loved talking with her about my ideas and learning her thoughts. Unlike Socrates with Xanthippe, I would insist that Jenny remain with me if I had a pressing philosophical question to discuss. 3 Table of Contents General Introduction 5 Chapter One: The Relationship between virtue and wisdom 12 1. The immediate context of the Right Exchange 14 2. Separating the soul in Socrates’ Defense and the coin metaphor 20 3. Translating ‘κάθαρσίς’ and ‘καθαρµός’ 26 4. ‘µετά’ in the Right Exchange 33 5. Philosophical motivations for virtue in the Reprise 40 Conclusion 47 Chapter Two: Bodily desires and the soul 51 1. Two views about bodily desires 52 1.1 The subject view 53 1.2 The source view 56 2. The person, the soul, and the body 60 3. The disembodied soul 68 3.1 Initial discussion of disembodied souls (80e1-81e3) 69 3.2 The myth (107d4-114d1) 71 3.3 Comparing the two portrayals 75 4. The soul: uniform or composite? 82 4.1 Evidence against tripartition 83 4.2 The question of partition 85 4.3 A sketch of the soul 88 Conclusion 91 Chapter Three: Deficient virtue 95 1. Preliminary discussions of apparent virtue and political virtue 96 1.1 Apparent virtue 96 1.2 Political virtue 104 4 2. The case for the distinction 107 2.1 Evidence in favor of distinction 108 2.2 A characterization of political virtue 111 3. Rejecting the distinction 115 3.1 The philosopher has genuine virtue 116 3.2 Objecting to the evidence for the distinction 117 3.3 Political virtue as apparent temperance and apparent justice 128 4. Further questions about deficient virtue 132 Conclusion 138 Chapter Four: The right way to do philosophy 141 1. False philosophers and doing philosophy the wrong way 142 1.1 The antilogikoi 142 1.2 Natural Philosophers 146 1.3 The Pythagoreans 149 2. False philosophers outside of the Phaedo 157 3. A characterization of true philosophy 164 Conclusion 180 General Conclusion 183 Bibliography 192 5 Introduction Much has been written on Platonic ethics and moral psychology. And, much has been written on Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue that portrays Socrates’ last day and death. But rather little has been written on the ethics and moral psychology of the Phaedo. Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, aside from being a dramatic masterpiece, the dialogue has quite the philosophical payload, including four proofs of the immortality of the soul, an argument for Plato’s theory of learning as recollection, and perhaps the first elaboration on the metaphysical theory of Forms. As a result of this embarrassment of riches, commentators working on the dialogue have plenty to puzzle over aside from ethics and moral psychology. Moreover, ethics and moral psychology appear to be given little emphasis in the Phaedo, and what is said about them does not seem to add any substance to what we find elsewhere in the corpus. Accordingly, the Phaedo seems to offer little to appeal to the interests of scholars working on ethics or moral psychology. Such is the state of scholarship that, for instance, in Plato’s Ethics Terrence Irwin’s only real treatment of the Phaedo is as part of an investigation into the theory of Forms. I think that this understanding of the Phaedo is misguided. I believe that there is much we can learn regarding ethics and moral psychology from the dialogue. This is not to deny the obvious, namely that overtly ethical passages are in relatively short supply in the Phaedo.1 However, there are two sustained discussions of moral views: in Socrates’ Defense (63e6-69e4)—which includes the Right Exchange (69a5-c2), a passage explicitly contrasting genuine and counterfeit virtue—and in a passage I call the ‘Reprise’ (80c1-84b5). Both of these passages are packed with important ethical details, and both 1 As far as moral psychology goes, since Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul, no one could deny that the dialogue is concerned with the nature of the soul, and so, psychology. But, moral psychology does 6 come at watershed moments in the dialogue. The former is Socrates’ meticulous apology for philosophy and his attitude toward death. Furthermore, it sets the agenda for the subsequent arguments, as the balance of the discussion is aimed at justifying one of its key assumptions, namely that the soul is immortal. The latter is a passage that recalls many of the elements from Socrates’ Defense. And, Plato highlights the significance of the Reprise by concluding it with a long silence wherein most present reflect upon its content, undoubtedly an invitation for us as readers to reflect on it also. I believe that Plato is drawing the reader’s attention to these passages because he takes them to be fundamental to the dialogue and the nature of ethics. But in order to see and appreciate their significance, as interpreters, we must do a lot of work. The present study is the beginning of this work. And, as I shall try to show, this work is worth it, both for our understanding of the dialogue and for our understanding of Platonic ethics generally. In what follows I will offer a comprehensive interpretation of the ethics and moral psychology of the Phaedo that demonstrates that these are central issues—perhaps the most central—in the dialogue. Moreover, as I will argue, the Phaedo contains an ethical theory that differs significantly from the traditional understanding of Platonic ethics. Accordingly, the dialogue is an indispensible text in Platonic ethics. I make the case for these claims as follows. In Chapter One I inquire into the relationship between virtue and wisdom in the Phaedo. In order to do so I consider in detail three passages: Socrates’ Defense (63e6- 69e4), The Right Exchange (69a5-c2), and the Reprise (80c1-84b5). I argue that properly understood all three passages—along with an explicit characterization of wisdom 7 (φρόνησις)2 at 79d1-4—indicate that Socrates holds that virtue does not require the possession of wisdom, but instead requires the desire for wisdom. Thus, I argue that the view of virtue we find in the Phaedo is strikingly different from the traditional understanding of virtue in the early dialogues—where virtue is usually identified as wisdom—and the Republic—where virtue requires wisdom. I provide several arguments for this radical interpretation of the relationship between virtue and wisdom. First, I argue that Socrates does not hold that wisdom is required for virtue. My argument for this is based on Socrates’ characterization of virtue as what purifies the soul of bodily desires, and so, separates the soul from the body. And, because possessing wisdom requires that the soul be separate from the body, virtue is what facilitates the pursuit (and ultimately the possession) of wisdom. Thus, wisdom is not required for virtue, but instead virtue is required for wisdom. Second, I argue for my interpretation based on Socrates’ exhaustive dichotomy—present in all three passages— of philosophers and body-lovers. Unlike non-philosophers, who are only motivated by bodily pleasure/pain, and so at best possess a form of merely apparent virtue, the philosopher, who alone possesses true virtue, is only motivated by wisdom. So, with regard to motivation, the most significant difference between apparent virtue and true virtue is that the latter is motivated by wisdom. Thus, genuine virtue is characterized by desiring wisdom. Finally, I argue that Socrates makes it plain that the reason that philosophers are virtuous is because virtue is required for the soul to continue pursuing and possessing wisdom after death (83e4). So, virtue is desired because it is required for 2 As I discuss below, throughout the Phaedo Socrates consistently employs ‘φρόνησις’ rather than ‘σοφία’ to refer to wisdom. Indeed, he only uses ‘σοφία’ twice in the entire dialogue (96a7 and 101e5), and in neither case does it refer to the highest cognitive state, that is, the state sought after by the philosopher (see Johnson (unpublished): 11-12).

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