Phaedo says yes. He himself was present in jail the day Socrates drank the hemlock.

It’s been a while already. It was a memorable day. The friends met earlier than usual in the vicinity of the Athens jail. It was the dawn of the last day. The doorman invited them in. Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was at his side, holding their child in her arms.

Phaedo tells that Xantippe then uttered one of those typically feminine cries, a wail of grief, and said a few true words: “For the last time now your friends will speak to you, Socrates, and you will speak to them.”

The shape of the Phaedo

Some of Plato’s dialogues resort to the literary technique of framing or “dolls within dolls”: the dialogue does not occur directly, but is reached through the narration of one of the characters. Sometimes the narrator participated in the dialogue and tells the memory of him. Other times he was not present and it is based on the account of someone who was.

Far from being gratuitous, this technique has an essential philosophical meaning to understand the writing project that is Plato’s dialogues.

In the case of Phaedo, the body of the dialogue is made up of Phaedo’s account of the last day of Socrates’ life. It is an indirect dialogue, since the speeches of Socrates and his friends appear framed in the conversation that Phaedo has with Echecrates, the uninformed interlocutor who asks “what did the man say in the face of death and how did it end” (the Greek understands dying as finish and finish).

Not only is the frame an essential part of the form of the dialogue, but the unfolding of levels allows effects that could not occur otherwise. Fundamentally, observation from the outside and critical examination, which result from the internal replica of the external relationship between the book and its recipients: the attention of the readers is on the dialogue Phaedo what Echecrates’ attention is to Phaedo’s own narrative.

the sun is setting

Xantippe’s cry of sorrow must be heard: it is the funeral music, peculiar to this dialogue, against which to measure the weight and gauge the merit of what comes next.

Neither Socrates nor his friends will give in to tears, those great enemies of speech that blind vision and block words. Xantippe is fired. During the last day in jail, with the hemlock on the table, silence will not reign but words (listen). Socrates and his friends will talk about what it means to be dead. They are the feats of philosophy: taming death not by subjugating the monster that guards Hades, as Heracles did, but by saying it.

Which in this case is all the more significant because there is the hemlock, there is the sun, declining in the sky, and the importance of discerning the valuable from the superfluous and always choosing the first, never the second becomes more evident than ever. .

If at the beginning of the memory of Phaedo the cry of Xantippe had to be heard to silence it, at the end it is Crito’s deluded plea that, by contrast, allows us to perceive how difficult it is to assume what Socrates is assuming.

Crito says: “Wait, Socrates, there is still time. Don’t drink the poison yet. Look at the sky, the sun has not set yet.

It is the attitude of the majority, to postpone the confrontation with death.

Socrates replies: “Dear Crito, I would be ashamed of myself if I now demonstrated the attachment to life against which I have always spoken. It would be stingy to rush the drink when there is nothing left. There is no need to fool yourself. The sun is already setting. It is necessary to pay the debt and die with integrity”.

What is the “soul”?

While we live, everything in us and around us (the color of the sky, the warmth of the air, sensations and feelings) changes constantly. What life lacks is unity, congruence, stability, meaning. To worry about death is to worry about that meaning. Without this restlessness, life would be nothing more than a crazy sequence of incoherent episodes.

A Greek can call the unit of meaning of life “soul” (psyche). Whoever philosophizes deals not with life and the “body” (what changes, confuses and shakes), but with death and the “soul”, the name of separation and detachment from the first. Philosophy, like art, turns away from life in order to understand it.

Phaedo remembers that in the middle of those brave speeches there was a long silence. Swans, said Socrates, sing their most beautiful songs in the waiting room of death. And they are not songs of sadness, as most believe, but of joy.

Phaedo confesses that his admiration for Socrates never overwhelmed him as much as at that moment. He encouraged them not to give up and to keep the flame of conversation alive while he caressed his head and played with his hair: “Tomorrow, Phaedo, perhaps you will cut this beautiful mane of hair. Or maybe not, if you listen to me.

It is then when the speeches become more than ever spells, spells, enchantments; stories and tales capable of comforting the weeping child who in us continues to fear death.

say the unsayable

It is usual that in Plato the myth replaces the argument when a limit of comprehensibility and expressibility has been reached. There is no knowledge or speech about death. To deal with this situation, the dialogue introduces stories that are deliberately crazy, inappropriate, crazy; precisely for this reason they cannot fail, because they have already failed beforehand.

He Phaedohe Gorgias and the Republic They are dialogues that include certain myths called “eschatological”, fantastic stories about the border beyond which there is nothing.

Only an inadequate saying is adequate when it comes to talking about the state of not being, not living, not seeing, not knowing that, nevertheless, it is the only indelible and immortal thing: what have I done in total, who have I been ultimately.

Aida Míguez Barciela, Professor of Philosophy, Zaragoza’s University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.