Journal of the History of Philosophy

Socrates on the Immortality of the Soul MARK L. MCPHERRAN ACCORDINGTOSOCRATES, the philosophical activity he engages in and which he has been divinely commanded to urge on all and sundry has as its primary goal the care and tendance of the psuch~, the soul (t~spsuch~sepimeleisthai lap. 29d9-e,; Xen. Mere. 1.2.4-5]; therapeia psuci~s [Pr. 312b8-cl; La. 185e4]).' Thus, he goes about asking: "My good friend.., are you not ashamed of caring for money and how to get as much of it as you can, and for honor and reputation, and not caring or taking thought for wisdom and truth and for your psuch~, and how to make it as good as possible?" (Ap. 29d7-e2). Again, This paper was wriuen in memoriumN. S. A condensed version of it, "Socrates on the Fate of the Soul," was presented to the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association , March, 199z, in Portland, Oregon. My thanks to Eve Browning Cole for her remarks on that oczasion. I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Fellowship 0989 9o ) that provided me with the time to write the bulk of this piece, and to Shigeru Yonezawa and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. I am especially grateful to my good friend, Nicholas Smith, for his comments on an ancestor of this paper, and for his spirited and constructive (and continuing) resistance to its thesis. ' For a discussion of the origin, nature, and scope of Socrates' obligation to do philosophy, see M. McPherran, "Socrates and the Duty to Philosophize," SouthernJournal ofPhilosophyz4/4 0986): 541-6o. In this paper I assume the generally recognized chronological division of Plato's dialogues into "early," "middle," and "late" periods. Listed in alphabetical order, the early dialogues are Ap., Ch., Cr., Eu., G., HMi., lon, La., Pr., R.I, (with Eud., HMa., Ly, Mx., M. [and possibly G.] serving as "transitional dialogues"). I also employ the common interpretive strategy which takes the early dialogues to represent Plato's attempts at philosophizing more Socraticousing fictional recreations of his teacher, thereby exhibiting the methods and views of the historical Socrates (with the Apo/og~our most reliable source). For a classic defense of this approach, see G. Vlastos, "Socrates," Proceedingsof the British Academy 74 (1988): 89--111; now revised and included in Socrat~:lronistand MoralPhilosopher(Ithaca, 1991): 45--106. I follow Vlastos, Socrates, 99-1o6, in granting Xenophon the status of a confirmatory source (subject to close interpretive scrutiny), and although I count the Phaedo as a middle-period dialogue, I make inessential reference to what I take to be its biographical traces of the historical Socrates. Despite the potential richness of AldbiadesI as a source for Socrates' view of the soul, I avoid use of it here because of its questionable authenticity. [q 2 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:1 JANUARY i994 Socrates exhorts "young and old alike....... not to care for your bodies or for money sooner than, or as much as, for your psuch~, and how to make it as good as you can" (Ap. 3oaT-b~; trans. Burnet)., It is safe to presume that since the psuch~ is the focal point of Socrates' philosophical mission he must have had at least some minimal account of what it is (after all, it's the odd man who urges others to care for something he knows not what). So what, then, did Socrates understand the psuch~ to be? This question is an important one, and no exact consensus on its answer has emerged. But it is now a virtual dogma of the scholarship that we can at least be sure of part of the answer, namely, that Socrates was committed to-or at least "accepted"--the view that the soul is such that its post-mortem fate is not annihilation, but continued existence in another realm.s In what follows, I shall contend that this attribution is unwarranted by the evidence, and that if we must credit some sort of eschatological stance to Socrates, a variety of considerations--especially the Apo/og)'s argument for death's goodness (4oc4Id )--show that a qualified agnosticism is our best...