Plato, Phaedo | The Body as Prison to the Soul | Philosophy Core Concepts

hi this is dr. Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason IO where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well one of the most striking metaphors in Plato's great work the Phaedo is of the body as being something like a prisons my depiction of a prison here a prison cell for the Soul and he's got this really interesting account that doesn't just have the soul of prisoned stuck within the material body but has the soul playing a role sort of collaborating with its own imprisonment because it doesn't actually understand how how I could get out of this and making its condition worse and then philosophy coming in and playing a role a gradual goal in liberating the soul from this so let's start out first with this metaphor Socrates says and this is probably the most stark expression of platonic dualism and against the body anywhere you're gonna find and Plato's dialogues Socrates says that the body is like a prison to the soul so that the soul is stuck inside and can only look through the bars remember - he's in a prison cell at this very time the soul can only look through the bars what's outside so that the body acts as a kind of filter for reality and reality is going to turn out to comprise two different realms we're going to get to that in just a moment but let's let's think about this first so the metaphor is that the body ends up filtering out what the soul can actually perceive the soul is stuck within it and it's a helpless prisoner it says bound hand and feet and again remember Socrates was himself shortly before this conversation bound in chains and they're only releasing him so that he can die so there's a lot of interesting symbology going in here now when we go a little bit further with us you notice I've got this rather complex diagram here the passage that we're looking at Socrates tells his interlocutors that the relationship between the body and the soul is not just this is prison relationship but that the body gets used by the soul but also contaminates the soul with materiality so it's interesting because the soul can actually take on the characteristic of body this is his his way of you know sort of suggesting that some souls aren't ready to move on right away into another state of being after after death after separation for the body because there's so much of the body contaminating them now how does this happen Socrates has this metaphor of rivets and you know think of pegs or think of you could use other things as well think of stitching in terms of clothing or think of glue that can binds things together the body the body the soul are together while we're in this life right the body relates itself to the visible and material world so the body is kind of a locus for giving us the way to engage with this this world that we see here you know what we're filming right now this chalkboard you know it's solid if I want to write on this truck board it's not my sole writing on the truck where the soul is in some way directing the body to do that so the body relates itself to the visible material world through action but also in large part through the senses through hearing through site through smell through touch so you know the chalkboards here because I'm touching it I can see it there it makes a little wrapping sound right we could do a whole bunch of experiments this way the body also is the locus where desires and fears of things in the the larger material world occur so you know in another place Socrates will say it's because of the care of the body that we pursue things that distract us like wealth you know you need money so that you can keep feeding your body or so you can dress up in nice clothes you know or warm clothes this is actually great example this corduroy jacket because it serves you know a purpose as far as being a nice bourgeois intellectual you know I put on your corduroy jacket and your study and all that that's sort of business but I also like it myself because it's warm its corduroy so it's great for for cool weather but that's that's about the body right the soul doesn't get cold the body gets cold the body wants to be dressed up the body needs all these sorts of things there's desires and fears associated with it and along with this pleasures and pains and Socrates will say every pleasure and every pain that the body feels and which the soul then experiences through the body is like a rhythmic binding the two of them together or you can think of it as sort of like an entry point whereby materiality comes more and more to intrude upon to penetrate to occupy to contaminate the soul with with the essence of the body meanwhile what the soul really ought to be doing Socrates says is concerning itself with what's really real what's not just apparently real but what's really real the unseen by the way the other word for unseen ie nice in Greek Hades is what we we translate it as is the unseen world but we don't need to worry too much about that but the unseen world of the forms the realities that we can perceive not through the body but only through the mind or the soul they're pure they're uniform and they're divine this is where this is the realm of the the gods or the God or God ship or whatever you want to call it for Plato and the soul can only do that by breaking the connection with the body and contemplating the divine dissociated from the body and that you know there could be certain pleasures and uses this in other places the pleasures and pains that that might come with this but they're not gonna be the pleasures and pains of the body they're not could be plenty even pains of satisfying thirst or hunger or sexual desire or even the desire for honor or domination so he talks here about here we go the the role of philosophy what is philosophy to do philosophy has to show the soul first off that the soul is actually collaborating with the body by doing all these things in relation to the the visible world and feeling pleasures and pains the soul is collaborating with the body in its own imprisonment so he says philosophy can see that the imprisonment is affected by the prisoners own active desire the soul feels desire and it desires through the body into the visible world and it occupies itself with that so the the designer makes the sole accessory to its own confinement so philosophy approaches the soul in this condition and then it says look you know all this stuff over here this is really real you want to be turning your attention to something over here this is very much like the the allegory of the cave isn't it that he talks about in the Republic and then what with the this the the soul finds out through philosophy is that what it must do is refrain from using the senses unless it needs to instead it's supposed to collect and concentrate upon itself and use its powers to grasp what's in the unseen but intelligible world and attribute no truth to anything which it views indirectly as being subject to variation because such objects are sensible and visible but only to what the soul sees as intelligible so the soul of the true philosopher is going to realize that what we need to do is actually free ourselves of all of this stuff over here and concentrate just on this that's how we liberate ourselves from the prison that is the body otherwise all of this is going to contaminate the soul and so when the the season when the separation occurs between the body of the soul the soul is really just contaminated with materiality it was not able to move on to its it's a proper place which is the real world of the forms the eternal the unchanging the divine

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 31,085

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Student, College, University, Sadler, Plato (Author), Phaedo (Book), Prison (Quotation Subject), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Soul (Quotation Subject), Ascesis, Asceticism, Purification, Filter, Socrates, Socratic, Dualism, Pleasure, Pain, Desire, Fear, Reality, Metaphysics, Ethics, Purity, Divine, Matter, Material

Id: mRq0oQZKArY

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 15 2014