predication and immortality in plato’s phaedo

Predication and Immortality in Plato's Phaedo

by Edwin Hartman (University of Pennsylvania)

It will be the argument of this essay that the final proof of theimmortality of the soul in the Phaedo is vitiated by Plato's faüureto make a subtle distinction which turns out to be of cnicial im-portance for some of the main themes of his metaphysics. Plato'sapparent mistake in this argument involves an ambiguity whichpervades his System and helps to account for some difficulties hecomes to see in it. It is not true, then, that Plato's problem is simplya failure to distinguish with sufficient care between things andimmanent Forms, or between causality and entaihnent. But under-standing the argument does require understandüig both of thesedistinctions; so we begin with them.

Things and immanent Forms constitute the bottom two levelsof the three-level ontology peculiar to the Phaedo. The latter havebeen called characters, qualities, and ta en hemin. That they havesome sort of Status independent of the familiär transcendent Ideasof the dialogues of the middle period is clearest at 102 d, where"Bigness in itself" is contrasted with "bigness in us," and 103 b,where "the Opposite in nature" is contrasted with "the opposite inus." Nowhere in the dialogue does Socrates distinguish these twosorts of Form any less casually, nor does he further specify theStatus of characters, perhaps because he regards them äs perfectlyordinary pieces of furniture which do not demand special explana-tion. The characters are not mentioned again until P arm. 130b,where Similarity itself and the similarity we possess are contrastedwithout a hint that there is anything obscure or interesting aboutthe latter. But perhaps their unobtrusive reappearance in theParmenides after a long absence indicates that Plato, far from takingthem for granted, regards them äs a source of trouble. It seems safeto conclude for certain only that when a thing participates in aForm, it has the corresponding immanent character in it. So if athing participates in Hot, it has the hot in it — or perhaps we couldsay that it has heat in it, since both the adjective and the noun candesignate the character äs they do the Form.15 Arch. Gesch. Philosophie Bd 54

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218 Edwin Hartman

And here we touch on a new problem: Plato seems to be assi-milating thc causes of physical processes and the conditions oflogical rclations. As \vith the related distinction — or lack of it —bctwcen things and characters, it is not clear whether Plato isincapable of making the distinction or simply not concerned to doso because vvhat he has to say applies equally to entities or relationsof different kinds. Without conclusive evidence for the former alter-native, there is no reason not to give Plato the benefit of the doubthere unless it can be shown that he has exploited a resulting ambi-guity to construct a bad argument. Deciding the matter requiresconsidering the theory of "causality" which Supports Plato's proof.

Forms serve äs explanations: they are aitiai* Not very helpfully,äs he admits, Socrates teils us that a thing is hot or beautiful orwhatever it is because it participates in the Form Hot or Beautiful.To unpack this "simple-minded" explanation would involve givhigan account of the participation relation, and Plato himself does notdo that. But it is possible to say — and worth saying — that Platois not assigning what we should call causal efficacy to the Forms.It may be, äs Vlastos conjectures,5 that the point is that this womanis beautiful because she satisfies the conditions of beauty laid downeternally äs the logical content of the definition of the Form Beauty.That will do for present purposes, äs I am more concerned with the* 'clever" explanation, which is the one that enables Plato to demon-strate that the soul is immortal.

The clever explanation really explains. It is possible to show whyis jp by pointing out not just that it participates in F-ness but

that it participates in G-ness and that G-ness brings on (äs Socratesputs it) F-ness: that is, whatever participates in G-ness participatesin F-ness. One might call this relationship entailment: G-ness entailsF-ness. Not surprisingly, some Forms exclude others; so we can

for all his inferiority to the Form, in degree of reality, is not in violation of thelaw of non-contradiction, because size is a relative quality: Simmias can indeedbe both big and not-big. But Plato is equally ciearly making the point thatSünmias can change his (relative) size without ceasing to be Simmias, for it is notin virtue of his being Simmias that he is either tall or short. Just äs it is possiblefor Simmias to be big and not big at the same time, it is possible — pace Par-menides — for Simmias to cease to be (big) and yet continue to be (Simmias).Two problems are run together in this passage, but Plato seems to be makingprogress on both.

4 For much of what follows I am in debt to Gregory Vlastos, "Reasons and Causesin the Phaedo," Philosophical Review LXXVIII (1969), pp. 291ff.

5 Ibid., p. 306.



Predication and Immortality in Palto's Phaedo 219

explain someone's not being F by pointing out that he participatesin E-ness, which excludes F-ness. Notice that the clever explanationcan be logical or causal. Three brings on odd, two brings on even;but we also learn that fire brings on heat, snow cold, fever sickness,and the soul life. Glearly, to say that the clever explanation can becausal is not to say that the Form Fire goes about setting fires, orcausing anything at all. To say that a thing participates in a FormF-ness is to say that (and indeed, to explain why) it has the imma-nent character F-ness — that is, that it is F. So the fever in some-thing brings on sickness in virtue of the fact that the Form Feverbrings on the Form Sickness. In our terms, fever causes sickness.

Fire brings on heat and snow brings on cold. Now fire is notnecessarily meant to be an immanent character; it may be just whatwe see leaping up from something that is on fire. And it may bethat snow is in something only in the sense that it is on or insidesomething and makes it cold. A house that is on fire is hot becausethe hot fire makes it hot; a house that is covered with snow tendsto be cold. Plato easily speaks of certain substances and certainimmanent characters in the same way, and what he says about themis the same for both causal and logical relations: äs instances ofrelations among Forms, both sorts of relations are necessary in ässtrong a sense äs Plato can make out.6 It follows, I think, that Platowould regard his argument for immortality of the soul äs soundwhether the soul is a particular thing or an immanent Form.Whether he can do so validly is another question, one we shallanswer presently. What is certain is that he sees no problemsarising from treating fever, bigness (we may assume), fire, three,and soul alike äs bringers-on. In fact, it may be that Plato picks aränge of examples precisely in order to show the breadth of hisaccount.

It might be objected that Socrates explicitly restricts the argu-ment to characters rather than things when, in replying at 103 bto somebody's objection that it has been agreed that oppositescame from opposites and that therefore this System of exclusions(and entailments: these are fürst mentioned later, but they formpart of the System of explanation Socrates begins to set out at 99)could not be the right stcry, Socrates distinguishes between theopposite itself, which does not come from its opposite, and whathas the opposite, which does. Rightly understood, however, the

• Ibid., pp. 3l8ff.



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doctrine of change from opposites does not affect Plato's scheine ofexplanation.7 It would seem reasonable to regard the opposites-from-opposites argument äs applying to such complex objects äs men, andnot to such simples äs either fire or heat. There does seem to be amore plausible way to take the point; and it depends principallyon a rough distinction between complex substances and theirconstituents — an easier distinction to make than that betweencharacters and things. But perhaps Plato is vulnerable here. Heseems to think it perfectly obvious that the soul is the sort of thingthat is naturally a constituent rather than a substance with con^stituents, though the conclusion of his argument surely requiresthat the soul be able to exist on its own. On the other band, it issurely natural to think of a soul äs always being attached to anowner and so a constituent in that sense. Plato might have tried tosolve the problem by holding that there is accidental change toopposites but no such change in essential qualities, but the attemptwould lead him far from the topic at band.8

What makes an immanent character or a constituent substanceperish or depart ? The arrival of its opposite or of the opposite ofsomething it brings on or of something that bringe on the oppositeof it. So a certain group cannot be both three and four, and fire andsnow cannot abide together; and what is three cannot be even, andwhat is on fire cannot be cold. As Plato says at 105 a l—5: not onlydoes the opposite not admit the opposite, but that which bringsopposite to that to which it comes never admits the opposite ofwhat it brings on.

Now we are ready to look at the argument, which begins at105 c 9:1. The soul brings on life t o a body.

7 In fact, it is not clear that the principle of change from opposites amounts toanything more than the triviality that in Order for something to change andbecome 0 it must first be not-0.

8 As we have noticed, the importance of distinguishing between essence and acci-dent does not entirely escape Plato: see 102 c l—2 and n. 3 above. Understandingthat distinction is an important part of understanding the distinction betweenthing and character — in fact, it is an important part of understanding the conceptof a thing. One might regard Aristotle's Metaphysics äs an attempt to build upa coherent account of a world of persisting objects by working out the notion ofessence. That is not Plato's task in the Phaedo. It is not unreasonable to suspectthat this conception of the soul would be considerably altered by the successful

.completion of such a project, if Aristotle's views on the soul are any indication:but that is beside our present point.



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2. Death is the opposite of life.3. By the principle put forward at 105 a l—5, the soul does not

admit death.4. What does not admit the Form of even we call uneven; what does

not admit the just we call unjust; what does not admit musical,unmusical.

5. \Vhat does not admit death we call deathless (i. e., .immortal).6. The soul does not admit death (3 again).7. So the soul is immortal.8. The immortal (unlike the even, for example) is indestructible.9. What is indestructible departs rather than perish when the

opposite is brought on.10. The soul is indestructible.11. The soul departs rather than perish at the approach of death.

The argument is not sound. What the problem is depends onexactly what the word dechomai (admit, receive) means. A naturalInterpretation would be that admits 0 if and only if Q# is or canbe the case; so coffee admits heat and a dry log admits fire becausecoffee can be hot and the log can be on fire (that is, heat can be incoffee and fire in the log). In that case, what is wrong with theargument is the principle used in step 3 — that is, the principlestated at 105 a l—5 and used at 105 d 10—11. It just is not ingeneral true that what brings on a quality does not itself admit theopposite of that quality.

But why not ? The principle sounds plausible. Three, which bringson odd, cannot be even. Fire, which brings on heat, cannot be cold.But what Plato seems to have failed to notice is that it is one thingto say that fire is itself hot (and therefore cannot be cold); it is quitehnother to say that fke makes something eise hot. It so happensatat it is true both that tire is itself hot and that it makes somethingeise hot. But fever makes something sick without itself being sick(or healthy, for that matter). Again, tallness makes something orsomebody tall; but tallness is not itself tall (or short).

In fact, there are cases in which something can bring on a qualityonly if it does admit the opposite of that quality. For example, aman-eating tiger or a virus brings on death only if it is itself alive.

Could we make the argument work if we interpreted dechomaidifferently? We might, for example, Interpret "F-ness does notamdit G-ness" äs "If anything is -P, it cannot be G". This Inter-pretation would save 105 a l—5 and make step 3 right, but thenstep 5 would be wrong: what does not admit death in that sense is



222 Edwin Hartman

not necessarily immortal. Let F be sentience, G be death; then it isthe case that if anything is sentient, it cannot be dead. It does notfollow that sentience is immortal. The mistake is the same in eithercase. At either 3 or 5, admit must shift in meaning from "maketo have a quality compatible with" to "have a quality compatiblewith". I cannot see that Plato grasps the distinction.

It is a distinction one might easily miss. In both English andGreek it is possible to predicate one quality of another in two verydifferent common ways. When we say that honesty is admirable,we probably mean that the quality honesty is an admirable quality.But when we say that love is blind, we do not mean that love is aquality which cannot see; we mean that anybody who loves is blind,to some things.9 In general, we can say that an apparently straight-forward Statement of predication will turn out to have the logicalform (x) (0x -+\yx) rather than 0Y or something of the sort. InPlato's language, either form is expressed by "0 brings on " or"0 is " or " participates in T." The importance of the class-inclusional sort of predication äs a possible Interpretation has beendiscussed informally in a most enlightening way by Professor SandraPeterson, who calls it "Pauline predication" after the style of St.Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter XIII: "Charitysuffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vauntethnot itself . . ." and so on.10 I am claiming that in our passage Platoassumes that the soul is alive in the Pauline sense and concludes thatit is (always) alive in the ordinary sense — or at least draws aconclusion which implies this.

There is a plausible Interpretation to be discarded before we goon to discuss the importance of Plato's mistake. It might be thpughtthat Plato is all along saying in effect that the soul is by definitionalive. In that case, the argument would.be a sort of ontological

9 One might object that "Honesty is an admirable quality" is a short way ofsaying that men are admirable insofar äs they are honest. But need it be ? Is itnot äs possible to admire a quality äs it is to admire a person ? Here the bürdenof proof seems to me to be on the ontological reducer who holds that "Love ispleasant" and "Love is blind" are equally Statement about people who are inlove. For all I know, it may even be true. Why, if honesty is admirable, can't itbe honest ? That does sound odd. Clearly there is much more to be said about allthis.

10 I have not discussed this topic with Professor Peterson. Vlastos has taken up thetopic and reports his findings in "An Ambiguity in the Sophist", forthcoming. Heis unable to find any convincing evidence that Plato clearly understood theambiguity.



Predication and ImmortaHty in Plato's Phaedo 223

proof for the eternal existence of the soul, whose death (non-existence) is impossible because a dead soul is a contradiction, likea monexistent God. But in fact the argument rests on the premisethat the soul brings on life to a body, just äs fever brings on sickness.Fever is not sick nor, generally, is everything that brings on charaoterized by the quality it brings on; it follows that there is no goodreason to impute to Plato the question-begging jnitial assumptionthat the soul cannot be dead.

It has been argued that Plato's problem is a failure to distinguishthings from characters and to treat the soul äs now one, now theother.11 This criticism is on the right track. As I have suggested, itis not clear how Plato would go about distinguishing any characterfrom a minuscule thing. The soul is a particularly difficult case:the Status of the mind remains a matter of controversy. It would notbe surprising to see Plato begin the argument with a conception ofsoul äs what makes the body alive (i. e., äs a character of the body)and end it \vith a conception of a live and in fact immortal soul (i. e.,a live, immortal thing attached to the body). Does a soul make abody alive äs having three sides makes something triangulär, or äsfire makes something hot ? It is only in the latter sense that thesoul itself is alive, for surely äs an attribute it would not be alive;and it is only in the former sense that Socrates can assume that itbrings on life äs fever brings on sickness.

Is the confusion between thing and character the key ? It is if wecan say that when a quality brings on another quality (say fever-sickness), the brought-on quality will not be a quality of the bring

u R. Hackforth (Plato's Phaedo [Cambridge, 1955], p. 165) and David Keyt ("TheFaUacies in Phaedo 102a—107b," Phronesis VIII [1963], p. 169) argue thatPlato implicitly shifts the Status of the soul from character to thing in the courseof his argument. Hackforth bases his view that the soul is at least sometimesregarded äs a character on a mistranslation of 104 d l—3 (see Edith Hamiltonand Huntington Cairns, editors, The Cottected Dialogues of Plato, p. 86 for acorrect one, by Tredennick) and a consequent misconstrual of "the Form ofthree" in d —7 äs being of the same Status äs both three and the soul. It is not:three (not the Form of three), five, and fire all behave äs the soul does: theybring on some further characters and resist others; they occupy (kataschein)some entities and are occupied by others. The whole matter of the Status of thesoul is discussed in a clear and convincing fashion by Jerome Schiller ("Phaedo104—105: Is the Soul a Form Phronesis XIII [1967], pp. 50ff.), who disputesHackiorth's Interpretation and argues that the soul must be a thing or 104 d 9—10would entail that the body is immortal. I cannot say more about this here.I hope what I say below will make it clear that the distinction cannot be re-sponsible for Plato's fallacy.



224 Edwin Hartman

ing-on quality; but when a thing brings on a quality (say, fire-hot),the bringer has the brought quality. But we cannot say this. Three,hardly a thing,12 brings on odd and is odd. Hemlock, clearly a thing,brings on death but is not itself dead.

No doubt Plato would fare better if he did normally refuse toallow the bringing-on qualities to have the brought-on qualities.Surely heat is not hot any more than tallness is tall or fever sick;and though justice brings on virtue, we have seen the problems insaying that the character justice is virtuous äs well äs the just man.To have understood clearly that characters need not have thecharacters they bring on (any more than they have themselves)would have been a helpful insight for Plato, comparable in im-portance äs it is similar in import to an understanding of thenotorious self-predication of the Forms.13 To understand it wouldhave helped him to distinguish characters from things and to get aconsistent account of the soul.14

12 Frege's reasons for calling numbers objects are irrelevant here.13 See Gregory Vlastos, "The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides", in R. E.

Allen, Studies in Plato9s Metaphysics (London and New York: 1965), pp. 231ff.As Vlastos has subsequently observed, the term is not entirely fortunate: it isthe corresponding quality that is predicated of the Form, and not the Form itself.The controversy for which Vlastos is largely responsible has dwelt much onwhether Plato's view of self-predication was so crude that he understood itexactly äs he said it. My Interpretation of our argument suggests that Plato wasnot in sufficient control of predication and participation to avoid a major fallacyin it.

14 I suggested above that Plato is not concerned to distinguish things from charac-ters for the purposes of his theory of explanation. One might at this point be abit more speculative and a bit less generous: perhaps Plato has worked himselfinto a position with wide-ranging difficulties; Suppose Plato does think ofsubstances äs bundles of qualities. This view is not irresponsible; in particular, itdoes not necessarily assimilate the part-whole relation to the thing-qualityrelation. Anaxagoras may have done so; it does not follow that Plato did. But

. notice what can easily happen if one is unwary, äs many great philosophers havebeen on just this point. One sets out to give an account of what it is for a man tobe hot, or white, or tall. One takes care to put the matter perspicuously: we donot wish to say that the man is hot; instead, we say that there is the hot in theman. This is all right so far. But then one may be tempted to conclude that it isnot really the case that the man is hot. But what, then, is hot ? Heat must be.(Could it be that something like this begins at 102 c ?) At this point, one may findoneself conceiving of a substance äs a qualityless substratum. Conceptual analysishas been known to have such revolutionary consequences. It may be that Platohas a view which leads him in this direction, though it does not lead him all theway to prime matter. But we are free so suspect that in the Phaedo, anyway,




Nor is the blurred distinction between causality and entailmentresponsible for Plato's mistake. We cannot teil, and it does not mat-ter to the argument, whether the soul by its presence, in a bodycauses Kfe or is the logically sufficient (not necessary, pace Treden-nick's and Hackforth's translations of 105 c 9—1015) condition oflife; the question cannot be decided by deciding whether the soul isa character or a thmg. Characters can be causes:„a nian's speed maybe a cause of his stealing fifty bases. Things can be involved inentailments: there being water in me entails there being H20 inme.16

There can be Pauline and ordinary causes: hemlock causes death ;fire causes something to be hot. There can be Pauline and ordinaryentailment: whoever is fevered is sick; whatever is covered withwater is wet. The hardest case to imagine may be a character in-volved in ordinary entailment, That is, the character must bothhave and logically impart some other character. Perhaps this willdo: communicable disease is dangerous; so is anybody who has acommunicable disease. As far äs I can teil, all permutations arepossible; but it is true that things usually involve ordinary predi-cation and causal relations, while characters usually involve Paulinepredication and entailment.

Notice that the mathematical example is again seductive. In thePhaedo it would seem that there is nothing easier than to sav thatboth the group with three things in it and the number three are odd,perhaps partly because Plato did not have a term like "odd-numbered" to apply to the group äs opposed to the number. I savagain seductive because I speculate that Plato was led to think theFonns self-predicating partly because the geometer's circle is cir-cular; and if a circle is circular, why cannot justice be just ? And inthe Phaedo, if three is odd, why cannot heat be hot, justice virtuous,and the soul alive ?

Plato has a view which entails that qualities are the prime bearers of themselves.If it is true, then self-predication of both the ordinary and the Pauline sorts ismore understandable. Of course, this is just one way to look at the place of thePhaedo in Plato's scheine.

15 Tredennick: "Then teil me, what must be present in a body to make it alive ?"(Op. cit.> p. 87), Hackforth: 'Then teil me, what must come to be present in abody for it to be alive?" (Op. cit>, p. 58). Bück, Robin, and Müller have thecorrect sense.

16 Strictly speaking, water is not entailing; but Plato might well rcgard this äs acase of water bringin* on



226 Edwin Hartman

It is worth noticing that in this very argument Plato appears toprcdicate indcstructibility of immortality in a perfectly harmless— that is, Pauline — way. When, in step 8, he says that the invmortal is indestructible, he appears to mean not that the characterimmortal cannot be destroyed (though, given what he has saidabout the soul in view of its bringing on life, he may well believe thecharacter immortal to be indestructible), but rather that what hasthat character cannot be destroyed. It is' not obvious that Platosaw exactly what he was doing at this point. If he had, hemight not have thought the soul immortal. More than that: hemight have taken another look at predication of Forms, äs welläs of characters.

Plato's uncertainty about the relation between the bringer-onand the brought-on turns up again in some of the things he has tosay about the Forms in some later dialogues, especially the Sophist.11

There Plato discusses not bringing on but participation of one Formin another: instead of saying that three brings on odd, one maysimply say that the Form Three participates in the Form Odd. Nowwhat we must notice about such Statements in the Sophist is that,in order for them to make any sense, they must not be construed ässtraightforward Statements about Forms at all, but äs Paulinepredications: from the fact that Form A participates in Form B itdoes not follow that B is literally predicated of Form A, but ratherthat anything that participates in A also participates in B.

For example: when Plato denies (at 256 b) that Motion parti-cipates in Rest, he does not mean to deny that the Form Motion isat rest, since, according to Standard Platonic doctrine (reiterated inthis dialogue at 259 b—c), all Forms are at rest. So at 252 d, wherethe Eleatic Stranger says that it is impossible that Motion shouldrest, what he must be denying is that an,ything that participates inMotion could at the same time participate in Rest. In the languageof the Phaedo, Motion is the opposite of Rest; whatever brings onMotion does not admit Rest; Motion does not admit rest, etc.Notice that if we were to Interpret all bringing-on Statements in thePhaedo in that way, we could make sense of all of them except one:namely, the statement that the soul brings life to the body. As Ihave argued, to Interpret the statement of bringing-on äs a state-ment about a quality attaching to the thing to which the bringercomes rather than about a quality attaching to the bringer itself

17 Here I am particularly indebted to Vlastos, "An Ambiguity". (See above, n. 10.)




ruins the argument. If we were to patch it up on the basis of whatwe have learned in the Sophist, the most it could prove would bethat a thing cannot have soul and be dead at the same time; itconld not prove that the soul is immortal, because from the factthat the soul brings on life we cannot infer even that the soul isalive, much less that it is immortal. "The soul does not admitdeath," interpreted äs analogous to "Motion does not participatein Rest/' does not mean 'The soul is immortal" any more than itsanalogue means "The Form Motion moves about."

Clearly, not all Statements about the Forms in the Sophist areto be interpreted this way; some, in particular Statements of non-identity of Forms, must be interpreted äs stating that Formsparticipate in other Forms and are themselves characterized by thecorresponding character. When we say (äs Plato does at 255 b 5)that Motion is not identical with Identity, we mean that the FormMotion is not identical with Identity rather than that anythingthat moves is nonidentical with Identity.

Plato nowhere gives any clear indication that he sees the dif-ference between these two sorts of predication. He manages to usethem both without getting tripped up in the Sophist äs he did in thePhaedo, but he never explicitly distinguishes them. I do not myselfthink he ever saw exactly what was going on, and I think he wasfor a long time badly misled by the resulting ambiguities: surelyself-predication indicates much. Justice is just, say the interlocutorsin the Protagoras; Beauty is the most beautiful thing of all, accordingto the Symposium; if the Third Man Argument in the Parmenidesis to have any chance of worldng, the Form Large must itself be alarge entity.18 As Pauline predications, these are all quiteharmless tautologies, and Plato has nothing to worry about fromany of them: the Form Justice need not be thought to behave justly,and the Third Man Argument does not work. But this reconstructionis altogether too rational: it would make nonsense of Plato'sapparent belief that the Forms are more real (i. e., that, amongother things, they have the appropriate qualities to a greater degree)than particulars and it would turn the mystical passages in theSymposium and the Phaedms into strings of bad puns. For example,with a clear understanding of this harmless sort of self-predication,

18 It has been argued that the TMA shows precisely that Plato did see the problemsin seif-predication. litcrally interpreted. It will be interesting to see how thePartisans of that view deal with Vlasto's Undings in the Sophist.



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Plato would have been less inclined to have Diotima teil howsurpassingly beautiful Beauty is, äs opposed to the so-called beauti-ful things in our world. But then, of course, his proof for the im-mortality of the soul would look very different. So, probably, wouldhis whole System.19

My thanks to Professors Charles H. Kahn and Gregory Vlastos for much helpfuladvice.



predication and immortality in plato’s phaedo

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