Apology Phaedo the Good Life

Plato's creates a dialog between Phaedo, Cebes, and Simmias in order to depict Socrates explanation as to why death should not be feared by a true philosopher. Plato's goal is to communication his belief that if a person truly applies oneself in the right way to philosophy, which is understood as the pursuit of ultimate truth, then they are preparing themselves for the very act of dying. Through Socrates, Plato bases his philosophical proof on the immortality of the soul, which he believes is the origin of our intellect.

Therefore, by following the course of our intellect which to Plato is the immortal soul, we will be following a path towards the immortal soul and therefore preparing for death and an eternal life thereafter. Several steps must be taken for the soul to be proven immortal. First the body and all the information acquired though it must be discredited. For without the question being addressed of whether sensory information can be trusted, looking inwards towards the soul and the intangible for the essence of truth would be absurd.

Plato must prove through Socrates that this is in fact so, For without this his legacy would be one of being condemned to death for committing a grievous crime. Not as a philosopher being granted a release from the body to achieve ultimate knowledge. For Plato, the body and its functions are only distractions and contradictions from the real and fundamental processes of life. The body is considered a necessary evil, or more correctly a necessary distraction to the functions of life.

For Socrates, life evolved into that which was pure and wise when denied earthly pleasures, and desires, and lives a more stoic live which pursued truth outside of the self, rather than gratification that is within the self. The body could be considered a nagging voice that would be appreciated only after it was removed.

By putting the soul at the center of the definition of who and what we are, then by seeking wisdom, mankind was seeking expanding knowledge in the arena of that which was important and lasting, rather than the temporal body.

If the body is only a distraction to pure, wise and intellectual thought, and intellectual investigation is the only way to achieve wisdom and knowledge of an object in itself, then the conclusion which these men sought to communicate was that by separation of the intellect from the burdens of the body is the only way to achieve absolute clarity of thought.

"Is death nothing more or less than this, the separate condition of the body by itself when it is released from the soul and the separate condition of the soul by itself when released from the body? Is death anything more than this?" As a practical result of this philosophy, death becomes the pinnacle of intellectual discovery, because death ushers the eternal soul out of the body into the everlasting. Death was not perceived any longer as the grievous end to all that is precious in life.

Plato and Socrates believed that in order to view real life in itself and by itself, one needed to control the body, and enable himself to live without the distractions of the body. This was the only way to discover philosophical truth. The essence of life, according to the philosophers who were trying to sell their ideas to indulgent Greeks was that the soul, and not the body, was the essence of live, the intangible was the center of live, not the tangible.

The practical outworking of this philosophy was that an ascetic live would lead a person in the direction of wisdom, and a pure life. Therefore, the pursuit of philosophy involves the denial of the body's desires due to their distraction to any intellectual activity.

Plato and Socrates described the acquirement of knowledge is an intellectual pursuit, one that the body confuses with faulty sensory information, Plato says through Socrates, "Now take the acquisition of wisdom; is the body a hindrance or not, if one takes it into partnership to share an investigation? What I mean is this: is there any certainty in human sight and hearing, or is it true, as the poets are always dinning into our ears, that we neither hear nor see anything accurately?" If the body is merely a distraction to the soul and philosophical investigation, this raises the question as to what happens to the soul after death.

Without a belief in an afterlife, the philosophers had created a paradox as to whether there is any philosophical investigation possible, or valuable. If the soul where to perish the instant it left the body,.