The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth and On Plato’s ‘Euthyphro,’ New Edition, Ronna Burger, St. Augustine’s Press, 2025, pp. 320, $30.00 paperback.
As Tulane University philosophical scholar Ronna Burger observes, Plato’s Phaedo, which depicts Socrates’ conversation with two young admirers in the hours leading up to his death-by-poison, mandated by the Athenians following his conviction for impiety and corruption, has long been regarded “as a locus classicus of the Platonic teaching.” In particular, the dialogue is widely understood as offering an exposition and defense of the supposed “twin pillars of Platonic philosophy,” the “theory of ideas” (or “forms”) and the immortality of the soul. For this reason, the Phaedo has been “accorded the distinction” (or for some, the “dubious honor”) of “having inaugurated Western metaphysics.” In other words, the dialogue is thought to embody the roots of what came to be called “Platonism.”
While the foregoing account of the dialogue undoubtedly reflects “the understanding of the speeches of Socrates displayed by his interlocutors,” Burger challenges the assumption that Plato intended his serious readers to come away with the same understanding as that of the interlocutors (whose intellectual limitations are often manifest). Such an assumption fails to account for Plato’s choice to have written it as a dialogue, in which the distinctive characteristics, concerns, and actions of the interlocutors; the circumstances of the discussion; and Plato’s representation of the entire conversation as having been narrated years later by another individual who was present (with the author himself reported to have been absent on account of illness) must be considered in order to understand it. (This aside from the fact that the two supposed pillars of Plato’s thought are expressed differently, often in conflicting ways, both within the Phaedo and among other dialogues where they are brought forth.)
In this deeply thoughtful study, originally published in 1984 but reprinted here with a new preface, an introduction added in 1999, and a concluding essay on Plato’s Euthyphro, Burger treats the Phaedo as a “labyrinth.” This is so not merely on account of the labyrinthine character of Socrates’ arguments, but because the very setting of the conversation is influenced by the legend of how the mythical Athenian hero Theseus defeated the monstrous Minotaur in his cave, saving the city from having had to sacrifice fourteen youths to his voracious appetite: Socrates’ execution had had to be delayed until the sacred ship sent annually to Crete to commemorate Theseus’ victory had returned. Socrates, Burger maintains, is portrayed by Plato as the new Theseus.
Initially, it appears, the monster Socrates is called on to overcome is his two young interlocutors’ fear of death, using (manifestly weak) arguments designed to prove that their souls are in some sense immortal — even though he never purports to demonstrate that the souls would retain their possessors’ personal identity. But ultimately, Burger argues, the true danger that Plato aims to overcome through the dialogue (a threat to which Socrates alludes on multiple occasions) is fear of the logos, or reason: if reason cannot seem to generate consequences that are satisfactory from the standpoint of men’s deepest concerns, they may turn into misologists. Above all, given the grounds of Socrates’ condemnation by the city, what is at stake is the survival of philosophy itself. By refusing to write any books himself (ostensibly for reasons Plato puts in his mouth in the Phaedrus), Socrates effectively left it to his preeminent pupil to devise a means of perpetuating his legacy. This meant that Socrates and Plato together had to become the inventors of political philosophy.
The distinction between political philosophy and “philosophy,” simply, is crucial to understanding the dialogue — and Socratic/Platonic thought more generally, as Burger explains. Even though Socrates is commonly thought of (thanks to portrayals by Plato, Xenophon, and the comic playwright Aristophanes) as the prototypical philosopher, there were certainly philosophers before him, centered in Athens but also in other Greek cities like Thebes. Socrates refers by name to one of them, Anaxagoras, in the brief “intellectual autobiography” that Plato has him recount. Socrates describes having sought, as a youth, to inquire into “the causes of each thing,” referring specifically to material causes, but then finding himself “blinded” in that pursuit. He was then enthused to have discovered a book in which Anaxagoras maintained that “Mind” is the cause of all things — only to experience disappointment upon finding that Anaxagoras didn’t live up to that claim, instead attributing whatever order exists in the world to material causes like air, ether, and water.
By contrast, Socrates alludes to the real cause of his awaiting execution: not his body’s “bones and sinews” moving him to prison, but the fact of the Athenians’ judging his condemnation to be “just,” and his own opinion that it was more “just” and “beautiful” to obey their verdict (despite denying the justice of the conviction at his trial). (As Burger notes, he apparently elevates considerations of justice and beauty over what he thought “best.”) The allusion to his trial brings to the fore the political context of Socrates’ present, otherwise often seemingly abstract, discussion.
Following his apparent rejection of Anaxagoras’ approach to causality, Socrates famously reports having overcome his “blindness” by choosing not to look at objects directly, but instead to examine their reflections in human logoi or speeches — questioning others’ opinions (as he does throughout Plato’s dialogues) in pursuit of a noncontradictory account of such objects as “the Beautiful itself,” the Good, and the Big — in other words, the Ideas. It must be noted that Socrates’ exposition of his new approach is far from lucid: his account of why his interlocutor Simmias is bigger than he is — because of his Bigness — might have been borrowed from Molière’s satire of Scholasticism. Nor does the following argument Socrates derives from that claim to demonstrate the immortality of the soul — that since Bigness cannot abide the presence of Smallness, neither can the soul “admit” its contrary, Death — bear critical scrutiny, even (at least temporarily) sufficiently to satisfy his interlocutor Cebes.
But it is noteworthy that Socrates introduces his reference to the Ideas as part of an effort to appease his interlocutors’ fears (though he will have to conclude the Phaedo, as he does other Platonic dialogues like the Republic, with an extended myth to succeed in that quest). More important, perhaps, is the contrast between Socrates’ behavior, in this and other dialogues, and the account he frequently proffers in the Phaedo of the outlook of “true” philosophers. As Burger notes, while providing a logos “explaining why it appears to him likely that a man who really spent his life in philosophy would be confident in dying and hopeful of finding the greatest goods [in an unspecified] ‘there’ when he has died,” Socrates is silent about the nature of these goods … nor does he confirm whether such hope for the future is identical with the philosopher’s [supposed] confidence in dying based on the life he has led.” In calling such men the true or “genuine” philosophers, Socrates confers on them “a name that reflects their own self-understanding” as “pure soul[s],” who will realize their goal only when released from their bodies and reunited with ‘the true.’”
In reality, noting the “hidden union between the many” (who want to “die of pleasure”) and the ascetic “philosophers” who look forward to the separation of their souls from their bodies, “Socrates stands back from both at once.” (Anyone tempted to regard Socrates as an ascetic should consider his presence as the “last man standing” in Plato’s Symposium—or wonder just how his young son, still in Xanthippe’s arms as she pays her husband a final visit, came to be generated. And consider Nietzsche’s comparison of a philosopher’s asceticism to that of a jockey, who limits certain indulgences only for the sake of achieving a greater, earthly, victory.)
Burger links Socrates’ endeavor to overcome misology with his rejection of misanthropy as well. Both, as indicated in his attempt to correct the errors of the dialogue’s narrator Phaedo, are reflections of a misguided “idealism”: the hope, bound to be disappointed, of finding either perfect knowledge (now, or in an afterlife) or perfectly just human beings. Again, we are reminded of the political character of Socrates’ own activity, in the sense of conversing with his fellow citizens (including, but not limited to, questions of the good, the just, and the beautiful) rather than spending his life, as he claims “true” philosophers do, “practicing” for death. And what Burger calls the “paradoxical truth” revealed by the myth with which Socrates concludes his extended argument to his audience is that “attachment to the souls entails attachment to the body” — again, contrary to the claims of the “true” philosophers. (Interestingly, furthermore, the myth portrays the cosmos, including the things above and below the earth — belying the impression that in turning to the examination of human logoi, Socrates had abandoned such concerns, or his interest in material nature.)
I can comment only briefly on Burger’s essay on the Euthyphro, the comic dialogue between Socrates and a religious fanatic (who has set out to prosecute his own father) that is set just as the philosopher has arrived to receive the indictment that will lead to his trial and execution. On one hand, Socrates’ dissection of the confusion that has generated Euthyphro’s remarkable pursuit would seem designed by Plato to refute the charge made by Aristophanes (comically, in The Clouds and seriously, by the accusers at the trial), that Socrates corrupted the youth of the city by undermining their respect for their fathers. On the other, by uncovering the incoherence in the conventional Greek theology that has helped to inspire Euthyphro’s vengeful pursuit of what he thinks of as justice, Socrates (Burger suggests) may seek to replace the poets’ Olympian gods with a set of “individual characters who exemplify the highest human types,” that is, men like Socrates and Plato themselves. Hence, she concludes, “Plato’s philosophic comedy is more than a defensive response to Aristophanes’ accusatory comedy,” but rather, “as a model of what makes a human life worth living, it carries on the philosophic endeavor of finding others like or potentially like himself.” (This notion of the ultimate purpose of philosophic writing is repeated by Plato’s successors, even those who lived many centuries later, such as Montaigne.)
As Burger remarks near the conclusion of her study of the Phaedo, the pharmakion (both “drug” and “poison”) that “truly fulfills the practice of dying, as a separation of logos from the living self,” is the written word of Plato, through which the Socratic teaching and way of life will be transmitted into the indefinite future. This provocative observation should serve as a further incentive to readers to undertake the study of Burger’s profound, though difficult, book, in conjunction with the dialogues that it interprets. Her study should help to overcome the assumption that Plato and his teacher were dogmatists, attached to the inculcation of “doctrines” that few today can find credible, rather than seekers of knowledge—philosophers in the literal sense—who can still assist us in our own quest for understanding both ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
David Lewis Schaefer is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross. He reviewed Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (“Combating the Rot in America’s Law Schools”) in our summer 2025 issue.
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