Plato's Phaedo: Philosophy as Preparation for Death › The Intellectual Context

What was Socrates arguing against? Greek thought about death and the soul was diverse and often pessimistic. The Homeric tradition, still influential in Plato's time, imagined the afterlife as a shadowy, diminished existence. The souls in Hades are mere ghosts of their former selves, unable to think clearly or act meaningfully. Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes, tells Odysseus in the underworld that he would rather be a slave among the living than king among the dead. Death, on this view, is the worst thing that can happen to a person. :::: {.callout-note title="The Homeric Soul"} In Homer, the *psyche* (soul) is not the seat of personality or thought during life. It is more like a life-force that departs at death and persists as a feeble shade. The Homeric soul cannot reason, remember clearly, or experience genuine pleasure. This is why death was so feared: it meant losing everything that made life worth living. :::: The materialists, represented by thinkers like Democritus, held that the soul is simply a physical arrangement of atoms. When the body dies and disperses, so does the soul. Death is annihilation, the end of consciousness and personal identity. There is nothing to fear because there is no "you" remaining to experience anything. The Pythagoreans, whose influence pervades the *Phaedo*, believed in the transmigration of souls. The soul is immortal and passes through many bodies, human and animal, in a cycle of reincarnation. This view takes death less seriously (it is merely a transition) but raises questions about personal identity across lives and the purpose of the cycle. Socrates draws on Pythagorean ideas but transforms them. He is less interested in the mechanics of reincarnation than in what the soul's immortality implies about how we should live now. If the soul survives death and its condition depends on how we have lived, then philosophy becomes infinitely important.