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In the Phaedo, we encounter a strange situation of a man who, though quite happy with the prospect of his imminent death, is nevertheless faced with the task of abeying the fears of his younger, less enthusiastic friends—their distress with losing their beloved teacher, as well as the general fear of death, is both the poetic and dramatic backdrop to this dialogue on the nature of the soul. The body—or, rather, a certain image, or metaphor of the body—plays an important role in these pages, not only in the definition of death at lines 64c4–7 (i.e., death as the separation of psuchê and sôma), but as a representative of all that is evil, or all that stands between us and that towards which we, as philosophers, strive. The metaphor is a powerful one, and has an honored place in a long tradition of turning to the body when seeking archetypes of opposition, obstacle, prison, or temptation. And so Socrates, in the Phaedo, blames something called "the body" when he discusses that which interferes with knowledge, threatening to falsify it with the mindless variability of sense.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-5658-5_6

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