David Egan Philosophy

The challenge of building a ten-week philosophy course on any topic isn’t so much deciding on what to include but deciding on what not to include. There are so many rich and varied perspectives on any topic worth taking seriously. Narrowing the list of readings down to ten is always an exquisite challenge.

One of the texts I didn’t include in my course on death is Plato’s Phaedo. I want to tell you a bit about the Phaedo first and then I’ll explain why I left it out of the course.

Plato’s Phaedo

The Phaedo recounts the last hours in the life of Socrates, Plato’s mentor and the main figure in almost all of his dialogues. Socrates was found guilty of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens (Plato being foremost among the unrepentant corruptees). He was sentenced to death in 399 BCE. In the Phaedo, a number of Socrates’ most devoted followers have gathered to bid him farewell and they are joined by two philosophers visiting from Thebes.

Socrates is unperturbed by his imminent death. He tells his companions that “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.” Death is a separation of the soul from the body, he argues, and since philosophers concern themselves with the soul and not the body, they should welcome this separation, as the soul will then be free from the distractions of the body.

But how is Socrates so sure that the soul will survive this separation from the body? This is the burden of the bulk of the Phaedo. Socrates offers four arguments for the immortality of the soul in dialogue with his interlocutors.

First, he argues that everything comes to be from its opposite—what becomes large must previously have been small, for instance—and so similarly what is alive comes to life from its opposite, death. There must be a perpetual cycle from life to death and death back to life or else there wouldn’t be a steady balance of living souls in the world.

Second, he builds an argument based on recollection of the Forms. In addition to our perceptions of particular beautiful things or particular just things, we seem to have more general concepts of things like beauty itself and justice itself. Since we never have direct perceptions of these Forms—of beauty itself, justice itself, and so on—we must have some innate knowledge of them that we acquire before birth. That would suggest that the soul is imprinted with knowledge from before birth, which in turn suggests the soul will endure after death.

The third argument builds on an affinity between the Forms and the soul. Beautiful things and just things undergo change and corruption—beauty can decay and just institutions can crumble—but the Forms of beauty and justice are unchanging. To be able to say that a soiled carpet is no longer beautiful, I need to have an unchanging concept of beauty to which to compare the carpet. Socrates likens the body to the changing things in the world and the soul to the unchanging forms. Physical things are visible, composite, changing, and—crucially—subject to decay and death. Non-physical things, by contrast, are invisible, simple, unchanging, and immortal. The body is physical, the soul non-physical, so the soul is immortal.

Fourth, Socrates argues that the soul is essentially alive, in contrast to the body, which is accidentally alive. To say that bodies are accidentally alive is to say that sometimes they’re alive and sometimes they’re not alive. There’s nothing contradictory about a body that was formerly alive and is now dead. But a soul is essentially alive: the idea of a non-living soul is as incoherent as the idea of a non-hot fire or a soundless melody. It’s simply not in the nature of souls to be anything other than alive.

Satisfied by these four arguments, Socrates recounts a strange and rather beautiful myth illustrating his conception of the afterlife, drinks hemlock, and peacefully slips out of consciousness.

The modern mistrust of metaphysics

If you find Socrates’ arguments unpersuasive, you get some idea of why I didn’t include the Phaedo in the course. I’ve given very brief summaries of fairly detailed arguments so there’s more to be said here. But the real obstacle, I think, isn’t that the arguments need fuller presentation. Nor is it that the arguments are unsound. The real obstacle that keeps most people today from engaging seriously with these arguments is that they’re metaphysical arguments.

Plato is confident that he can reach significant and substantial conclusions about the fundamental nature of reality just by reasoning about it. Armed with a bagful of abstract concepts and some logical tools he thinks he can make a confident prediction about the afterlife. In thinking that he can limn the nature of reality just by reasoning about it, Plato shares company with most philosophers through most of history. This kind of reasoning reaches its apogee in the Middle Ages, where you find Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophers contending to prove the existence, omnipotence, and benevolence of God by means of philosophical argument.

Many people don’t believe in God these days. Even fewer believe in metaphysics. When I present the Medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Tufayl’s argument for the existence of God in my course, “An Introduction to Philosophy in Ten Dangerous Ideas,” I find that even the religious believers are left cold by his reasoning. Faith, for those who believe today, is more about devotion or commitment. Coming to a belief in God as the conclusion to a chain of reasoning can feel as forced or contrived as using logical deduction to fall in love.

If you want to sound authoritative, talk like a scientist

What changed? Consider the kinds of reasons people give nowadays when they claim to be confident there’s an afterlife. These seem to come in two varieties. One involves personal testimony, often concerning a near-death experience, in which a person claims to have seen or experienced something that gives them insight into the great beyond. The other is a kind of quasi- or pseudo- or para-scientific reasoning in which people allege to have come upon objective evidence of life after death.

I won’t assess the merits of these claims. Instead I want to scrutinize their form. The personal testimony of a mystical experience is ancient. A lot of revealed religion is built around this sort of thing. But the second kind of explanation—the quasi/pseudo/para-scientific kind—is modern. What interests me here, to repeat, is not whether the science is sound. It’s the very idea that, if you want a claim to take on a certain authority these days, it needs to be dressed up in the language of science. (Pro tip: when you encounter the word “quantum” outside the context of high-energy physics, be very suspicious.)

What’s real is what science tells us is real—this is the modern dogma. Behind this dogma is a more basic one: that the fundamental way of grasping what there is comes by way of experiment and experience. We’re more inclined to trust someone’s testimony about their experience of an afterlife than we are to accept a Platonic argument that reasons its way to the idea of an afterlife.

A shift in worldviews

This modern dogma represents a profound shift from the worldview of the ancients. We’re inclined to say that the things we can see and touch are the things whose reality we’re most confident in. For Plato, the things we can see and touch are imperfect shadows compared to the real world of abstract Forms.

His model here is mathematics. Mathematics offers a domain of entities that’s perfect and unchanging. Any circular object you encounter in the world—a car tire, a dinner plate, a contact lens—will have slight imperfections in its roundness and the object can be broken. A mathematical circle has none of these imperfections. Surely the circles of mathematics are more real than the imperfect circular objects we encounter down here below?

You see a reversal of worldviews in the way that mathematics nowadays gets tacked on as the last of four items in the STEM acronym—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM has prestige because it’s useful (although don’t get a philosopher started on the question of what’s “useful”). Mathematics in the modern world has value because it’s a useful tool for manipulating the things we can see and touch with maximal efficiency. Its value, in other words, isn’t that it gives us insight into a higher world but that it gives us power over this one.

I don’t mean to suggest that we need to bring Greek- or Medieval-style metaphysics back into currency. I belong to the same world as you and I find Plato’s arguments oddly uncompelling as well. But I don’t think we trust scientific reasoning over metaphysics because we’re so much cleverer than Plato. On the contrary, Plato was much more diligent in scrutinizing the basis for his claims than most proponents of modern science. The idea that the world is more truly disclosed to us through the senses rather than through the exercise of reason is itself a metaphysical presupposition, and one that mostly goes unexamined.

You might say, then, that it’s not so much that we live in a world that’s lost faith in metaphysics. It’s rather that we live in a world that’s lost interest. 

1. There’s reason to think that the decisive moment that pushed the Japanese to surrender unconditionally in the Second World War wasn’t the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the near simultaneous Soviet invasion of Manchuria. The Japanese had been holding out hope that the USSR would act as a neutral third party that could help negotiate a conditional surrender. (source)
2. Before the invention of lip balms like chapstick, people rubbed earwax on their lips to keep them from chapping. (source)
3. There are two different ways of making the standard North American (rhotic) R sound: “bunched” and “retroflex.” They involve different positions of the tongue in the mouth but they’re almost indistinguishable when you hear them. (source)
4. The Gini coefficient is an (imperfect) measure of economic inequality in a given group. A Gini coefficient of 0 means perfect equality across the group and a Gini coefficient of 1 means that one individual has all the wealth in the group. If the world as a whole were a single country, it would be the fourth most unequal, with a Gini coefficient of 0.889, ranking behind only Brunei, Bahamas, and Brazil. (source)
5. A nice example of oral and scientific forms of knowledge converging: marine geologists in Australia recently discovered two ancient watering holes 14m below sea level (sea levels were much lower thousands of years ago) that also seem to figure in indigenous Australian songlines, orally transmitted story-songs that map the Australian landscape in words. (source)
6. The Mbendjele pygmies of northern Congo believe that the spirit world is inhabited by people with white skin. A common euphemism for saying someone has died is to say that they’ve “gone to Europe.” (source)
7. The melting of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age stripped Switzerland of the trace amounts of iodine that find their way into the food chain in most other places. As a result, until the early 20^th century, the Swiss suffered from unusually high rates of ailments like goitre that result from iodine deficiency. The innovation of iodized salt transformed public health in Switzerland. (source)
8. There is such a backlog of pending legal cases in India that, at the current pace, it would take 300 years to clear the docket. (source)
9. The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced to a Sumerian tablet from 1900 BCE: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” (Now let me wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes.) (source)
10. In Japanese, one way of expressing laughter online (like “lol” in English) is to write 大草原, which means “giant grass field.” The expression derives from the fact that “warau” is one way of expressing laughter in Japanese, and so an equivalent to “lol” is to write a shortened “www,” which in turn looks like blades of grass. (source)
11. Nonviolent resistance tends to be much more effective than violent resistance. In a study of 565 civil resistance campaigns in the last 120 years that have aimed to overthrow governments, about 51% of nonviolent movements have succeeded outright in contrast to 26% of violent ones. This holds true even when civil resistance campaigns are met with violence from autocratic leaders. (source)
12. There are around 28,000 different species of orchid. That’s roughly the number of mammal, bird, and reptile species put together. (source)
13. Up to 10% of bumblebees don’t return to the hive after their first foraging flight, either because they get lost or because they get eaten. (source)
14. Many Canadian cities have seen growing expenditures on policing—and Vancouver spends more per capita on policing than any other Canadian city—but there’s no consistent correlation between the amount of police funding and the crime rate in a city. (source)