Introduction to the Phaedo
Plato’s doctrine of recollection (anamnesis) is further elaborated upon in the Phaedo.
The Phaedo depicts a discussion with Socrates on the day of his execution, condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. In 5th and 4th century BCE Athens, those condemned to death were given an option to choose their method of execution, a means by which the State could avoid the pollution of spilling blood of a citizen. One form of execution was to be brought up to a high cliff where the condemned would be tossed off and, if the fall itself proved insufficient to kill, the condemned would be left there to die from their injuries, starvation or thirst, or from hungry animals wandering below. Another punishment was a bloodless crucifixion where the condemned was eventually strangled to death. The idea here being that spilling of blood was a bad thing; avoiding bloodshed was therefore necessary to maintain a clean state.
Another form of execution was by death by poison. The ancients knew from collective experience that certain plants were poisonous, and these properties could be utilized for a variety of purposes, including executing criminals. The common drug of choice in Athens was hemlock (Conium maculatum), a widely growing plant found in the environs of Athens. Consumption of this drug in the form of a liquid potion (infusion) would slowly begin to paralyze the major muscles eventually paralyzing the diaphragm, the muscle necessary for breathing. When respiration stops, death soon follows. This is the method of execution that Socrates choose in 399 BCE. Socrates remained steadfast in the face of his dissolution.
If you go to Athens today you will find a cave-like structure with a placard advertising that this was the jail in which Socrates died. The consensus is out about the exact location, but unlike modern societies, the Athenians were not equipped to house criminals en masse and not for long periods of time. A group of baton-wielding slaves called the Eleven were a police-like force that brought suspects in and guarded over prisoners. Instead of lengthy prison stays, persons were either kicked out of the city and forbade from returning upon further penalties or were executed in short order. The sources suggest that some were executed the same day of their conviction, other a day or two later. In the case of Socrates, however, his execution was delayed for a month. In the Crito, a wealthy Athenian, Crito, tries to persuade Socrates to leave the jail and live outside of Athens in a neighboring city state so as to avoid execution. Crito has funds to bribe the guards, pay for his safe passage and upkeep elsewhere. Socrates discusses Justice in this dialogue and states that he must abide by Athenian laws and thus thanks Crito for his offer but refuses. His delayed execution, therefore, lasted long enough for these types of events to occur.
In the opening of the Phaedo, the reason for the delay in execution is that a 30-day period of mourning is being observed in relation to a festival and no executions can take place during that time. During this period, Socrates receives visitors (including his wife and infant children) in his prison cell and, according to Plato, continues to engage in philosophical discussions while awaiting death. The Phaedo depicts the last philosophical conversation of Socrates and his followers, and the topic is of death, naturally enough, and why Socrates is not afraid of death. It is here that Socrates states that all philosophy is but a meditation on death.
Here Plato’s dualism is laid out explicitly. There is the physical body and the soul. The physical body dies; the soul is eternal. The physical body is corrupt; the soul is pure. Socrates argues that what we call death is only death of the body, but the soul continues to exist. He, therefore, is not concerned with the death of his body. He states that either there is nothing after death (a view held by the natural philosophers, like Democritus (~460-370 BCE) and other Atomists, or that the soul continues to exist after death. Unlike the afterlife depicted by Homer, where the souls of the dead are mindless suffers in the underworld, Plato’s Socrates envisions an afterlife wherein he can continue his philosophical conversations with the eminent and not-so-eminent dead. But is there any reason to believe that such an afterlife exists? Socrates and his followers (mainly two Pythagoreans) discuss the evidence for a continuation of the soul after death. Much of the remainder of the Phaedo is devoted to proofs of the existence of the soul and to its eternal nature. What concerns us here is one of those ‘proofs’, namely that recollection implies the soul’s immortality.
Recollection in the Phaedo
Cebes added: Your favorite doctrine, Socrates, that knowledge is simply recollection, if true, also necessarily implies a previous time in which we have learned that which we now recollect. But this would be impossible unless our soul had been in some place before existing in the form of man; here then is another proof of the soul’s immortality [72e-73a].
In the Meno, also grouped by scholars as a middle-period dialog and so roughly written around the same time as the Phaedo, Socrates tells Meno the myths about the immortality of the soul that he has heard from priests and priestesses and qualifies he statements with, Mark, and see if what they say is true. After the discussion about how the soul, through infinite incarnations, gains all knowledge and through correct question and answer that knowledge can be uncovered through recollection, Meno states to Socrates: I like what you are saying. To which Socrates replies, And I, Meno, like what I am saying. Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident[86b]. In the Phaedo, Socrates appears more confident in the assessment that recollection implies the soul’s immortality.
In a general sense, what a person recollects she or he must have known previously, but has forgotten through time and inattention [Phaedo 73e]. The arguments made in the Meno and here in the Phaedo is that we possess knowledge that we did not learn in this current life and therefore we (our souls) must have acquired this knowledge before birth. Socrates states:
[I]f there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; …, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession, then our souls must have had a prior existence, [too]… There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and if not the ideas, then not the souls. [76e].
Note here, in the Meno the theory of recollection is discussed to answer Meno’s paradox – how do you inquire after that which you do not know. But in the Phaedo, the doctrine is put forth as a proof of the soul’s immortality. Another distinction between the dialogs is that in the Meno the knowledge that is recollected – that of geometry or defining virtue – is more explicitly defined in the Phaedo as Forms or Ideas.
It is knowledge of the Forms – the Form of the Good, the Equal, the Beautiful, etc – that is known by the soul and thus is recoverable through recollection. How do we know what Beauty is as a single entity when, in our physical lives, we are confronted by multifarous aspects of beauty? Socrates (and Plato) wants to argue against the relativism of Protagoras – beauty is in the eye of the beholder – and say that there is a universal,unchanging, and everlasting form of Beauty. Things in the world are deemed beautiful when they participate (e.g., share, mimic) in Beauty and without that participation they would cease to be beautiful. Everyone will agree on what is beautiful, then. And it is knowledge of the Beautiful that all people possess and can be recovered through recollection.
In Plato’s conception of dualism – that the body and the soul are distinct and separable – knowledge belongs to the soul and not to the body: … for while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge and one of two things follows: either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or only after death [66e-67a]. This is a curious statement that
Evidence for the Theory of Recollection
What proofs of the theory of recollection are offered in the Phaedo? The initial premise is this: if anyone recollects anything, he or she must have known it before [73c]. The first proof offered is that when people are interrogated in the right way, they give the correct answer on their own accord and they could not do this without already possessing knowledge already [73b]. The text alludes to the demonstration in the Meno of the slave boy recollecting geometric knowledge with the assistance of Socrates and a diagram.
A second proof is offered with the following example:
I mean what I may illustrate by the following instance:—The knowledge of a lyre is not the same as the knowledge of a man? True.
And yet what is the feeling of lovers when they recognize a lyre, or a garment, or anything else which the beloved has been in the habit of using? Do not they, from knowing the lyre, form in the mind’s eye an image of the youth to whom the lyre belongs? And this is recollection.’
This is very interesting. What we have here is acknowledgment of associations in memory. Here someone may know or remember the lyre but when they think of the lyre they also think of things associated with the lyre, like the lover to whom the lyre belongs.
“And recollection is most commonly a process of recovering that which has been already forgotten through time and inattention.” <— seems out of place here.
The second ‘proof’ is that when we recall anything from memory we necessarily recall associated things. We are aware that the things we recall are not only sense objects (things that we have seen/felt/tasted/heard) but concepts such as equality, magnitude, good and bad. The things that Socrates (and Plato) would distinguish as Forms. How do we come to know of these concepts? At first, it might appear that we gain this knowledge through direct experience with the sensible world: we learn that two sticks are equal when we lay them side-by-side and compare them and learn that one is shorter than then other, and therefore they are not equal. But Socrates presses further. We may lay two sticks side by side and say, yes, they are equal in length. But are they really equal? Experience may provide examples of equal, non-equal, but physical objects are never so, like the circle we would draw in the dirt is not a circle, so too our judgment of equal in the physical world only approximates equal, but is not equal. Our idea of the ‘Equal’ (an ideal not manifest in nature but about which we make judgments of nature) is experience-independent (i.e., a priori). To make judgments about physical objects with concepts such as Equality (a concept we seem to know but does not exist in the physical world), Socrates suggests that we must have had this knowledge prior to experience (it was not derived from experience). “Then we must have known equality previously to the time when we first saw the material equals, and reflected that all these apparent equals strive to attain absolute equality, but fall short of it?”
How do we know these Forms if we never learned about them? Whence do they come into being? Socrates suggests that such knowledge is not available at birth and only comes about through recollection. He therefore concludes that we must have had this knowledge prior to birth and have only forgotten it (at birth?). Through the dialectic (question and answer) we recall the Forms and it is this knowledge (which does not correspond to anything in our sensory experience) that we possess without ‘learning’. These ideas will be picked up by later thinkers (I’m thinking of Kant, Chomsky, etc). In terms of understanding the concept of recollection in Plato and its relation to memory, what can we say about this?
The arguments put forth by Socrates go as follows. 1) when we recollect anything, we also call to mind other associations, for example equality and inequality (If I think of a lyre, I can also think of things that are similar (equal) and not similar (unequal). 2) the concept of Equality seems to precede any sensory experience. 3) Since we have sense perception at birth and the concept of Equality precedes sense perception, it follows that we must have acquired knowledge of these concepts all before birth [75d]. Socrates goes on. Either we were born with this knowledge or those who later, we say, are learning, are only recollecting, and learning would be recollection. Socrates asks Simmias which of the two alternatives he prefers, but at this point in the dialog he cannot choose.
Recollection is the process by which we uncover eternal knowledge of the soul. What is this eternal knowledge? Knowledge of the Forms (in the Phaedo). That is, knowledge of the Good, of Virtue, Equality, of Geometry (i.e., the Form of Circle is a mathematical concept that does not exist in the tangible world of appearances). In the Meno, the subject of knowledge of recollect seems more broadly defined [can I find a reference there?], the demonstration on the slave boy involves geometrical knowledge. This is an important example of what knowledge is for Plato – Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. Why? Because mathematics is eternal and ‘true’ 2+2=4 and always will. You can not argue with that statement. Once everyone agrees what the numbers and signs represent than that statement is always true (necessary and sufficient). This is the type of truth that Plato calls true knowledge. What Protagoras (see the next section on the Theaetetus) and other relativists will try to argue is that the world of appearances only produces contingent knowledge that is in flux and dependent on the knower (what is true from me may be false for you). This worldview is completely rejected by Plato, but since the world of appearances seems to be in flux, than truth must lie behind the appearances and this truth plato calls the Forms.
Recollection in the Meno and the Phaedo.
In the Meno, Recollection the process by which the soul’s previously acquired knowledge is brought forth to conscious awareness through the assistance of the dialectic (Socrates method of questioning). The specific form of knowledge amenable to recollection is not explicitly discussed, although the demonstration utilizes geometrical knowledge as the example. In the context of the Meno, although we may be currently unaware that we (or our souls) possess this knowledge, through the correct method this knowledge can be made available to us.
In the Phaedo, Plato holds a more skeptical view of knowledge. Socrates states, “… for while in the company of the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, and one of two things follows: either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or only after death [66e].” The aims of the dialogs differ and may therefore account for distinctions in their versions of the theory of recollection. Nevertheless, both dialogs speak of recollection, of memory, of knowledge, as possessed by the immaterial soul. As such, there is no need for Plato to discuss potential mechanisms, as mechanism are physical in nature. Recollection is therefore just a process of the soul as soul. It tells us little about memory per se. We will seek further understanding of memory processes in other dialogs.
Nathen Murawski 