ABSTRACT
Introduction Plato’s Phaedo remains the classical western text on death with Socrates arguing throughout that death is not to be feared because it is a blessed state insofar as we are freed from the body and its imperfections that create distortion and anxiety. Note that Socrates does not “prove” anything here as he is simply arguing about something of which he has no knowledge, basing his polemic upon an imaginary wish that a syllogism connects to the Real. The deep structure of his wish is imaginary not in the sense that he hopes to live forever but in his hope that a winning argument can convert ignorance into “truth.” Not only is this a good example of the limits of an abstract relation to the world, it is also a gloss upon the collective representation of the body, ignoring the Grey Zone of corporeality (that the body can give us both pleasure and in many cases can even cause us to find pleasure in what gives us pain, e.g. self-destructive action, and pain in what gives us pleasure, e.g. guilt). This exposes the difference between a bad argument and faulty conceptualization, for it is not that he contradicts himself, but it is that he has no strong notion of a human subject and its relation to pleasure. Further, this seems to apply to his argument as well since he appears driven towards this belief in the force of argument. It is not that Socrates is illogical but that he seems delusional. Is the drive of philosophy to treat syllogism as eo ipso Real, not similar in its relentless single-mindedness to the thrust of the body and the imperativeness of the corporeal sense of drive? Could Plato be showing us the thin line between philosophy and psychosis that the fear of death can arouse in the human subject? Are humans not driven to fantasize their eternality, driven to wish for it as an addict might be driven? Even those many who have criticized Socrates here for his argument have typically accepted that epistemology is a reasonable way to engage death, saying (as Simmias and Cebes) that his argument is not compelling, instead of noting the absurdity of trying to “explain” death through epistemology. Yet, most do not recognize the limits of such an approach itself, that a reflective conversational approach to death does not mean that the speech must be ruled by this kind of idealization of the method of argument. To overcome an argument about death that appeals to empirical and logical evidence, we have to conceive of other alternatives, but perhaps Plato is disclosing such a path in his representation
of the character of Socrates as a fool, as the one exemplifying Socratic ignorance, saying that in knowing that he is ignorant he is now committed in the present to affirm what he cannot know. Is Plato’s fool possibly one who has the desire to fool around with empiricism and with empiricists by provoking them to reflect upon what they exclude in their beliefs and action?
