On Plato's 'Phaedo' - Forms of Life

'Self-consciousness is Desire in general.Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, viz. itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object. In this sphere, self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which this antithesis is removed, and the identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for it'.

- Hegel, para. 167, 'Phenomenology of Spirit'.

The concept of desire is brought forth by Hegel in his discussion of self-consciousness, following on from an account of consciousness wherein it is demonstrated that every one of consciousness's endeavours to know objects involved a veiled operation upon the part of the subject and its concepts, pre-suppositions and theoretical fabrications. Such self-centeredness of Spirit in consciousness now assumes a new form in self-consciousness, that of desire, whereby objects are compelled to conform to the conceptions or preferences of self-consciousness, for just as consciousness disclosed itself to be subject-centred in a veiled fashion, with self-consciousness actions disclose themselves to be subject-centred also, that is to say, in one way or another things are forever being twisted so to speak or bent into shape so that they conform to the preferences of the subject. 'Self-consciousness is desire in general', Spirit as self-consciousness has a dual object, the exterior thing that is given in perception, and itself, that which is in opposition to the thing. Self-consciousness 'presents itself as the movement in which this opposition is removed, and the identity of the self with itself is established', in brief, when the subject transforms objects according to its will it is in actual fact being driven by the desire to confront itself, the desire of the subject to nullify the other and make of itself an absolute is of an identical sort as the desire to be confronted by the self and no other. The nature of consciousness compels this state of affairs, for consciousness is always a two-termed relationship that requires a subject and an object, and thus when the subject desires to know itself it must divide itself into a subjective side which knows and an objective side which is known.

To know itself consciousness must discover something to reflect itself but this entails that if the objective of consciousness is self-knowledge it cannot attain this by annihilating all objectivity but only through rendering objectivity reflective, by transforming objects into a reflection of consciousness. Insofar as self-consciousness desires to put its stamp upon all that is and to create a world for itself, it desires complete self-reflection whereby the transformed object becomes an extension of itself, thereby no longer is it truly other. Nonetheless, albeit it becomes a part of consciousness, in a manner of speaking, it is not like consciousness, it is not a being like itself, and the subject will therefore not attain satisfaction until it has seen its own nature in another being, and that other being in turn has recognized it, in brief this impulse for self-consciousness can only attain satisfaction by a being like the subject, and yet the subject does not want merely to contemplate this other subject, it must acquire affirmation from it in addition. The subject can only be assured that it confronts another being like itself if the other being in turn recognizes it as a being like itself, and therefore at a stroke the subject will satisfy the desire for self-reflection and individuation, the recognition of the other subject will affirm it in its identity, it will give it self-understanding as a being of a determinate sort.

It is true that the first forms assumed by self-consciousness, commencing with the Lord and Bondsman dialectic, (see my article A World of Gods and Monsters, part three), fails to achieve that which Spirit desires, and yet there is something of the nature of desire at a fundamental level in all forms of Spirit. As Hegel explains elsewhere: 'Every activity of Spirit is nothing but a distinct mode of reducing what is external to the inwardness which Spirit itself is, and it is only by this reduction, by this idealization or assimilation, of what is external that it becomes and is Spirit'. And furthermore, all the activities of Spirit, all modes of human being, are forms in which the subject strives to overcome otherness, which is to say: 'In cognition what has to be done is all a matter of stripping away the alien character of the objective world that confronts us'. And furthermore, given that freedom is only possible through overcoming otherness: 'Freedom is only present where there is no other for me that is not myself'. And 'freedom for which something is genuinely external and alien is no freedom; freedom’s essence and its formal definition is just that nothing is absolutely external'.

Such a triumph that Spirit attains over the other is only completely actualized in science, that is to say, in rational inquiry in general, for as Hegel explains: 'the aim of all genuine science is just this, that Spirit shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth'. And at the conclusion of his 'Philosophy of Nature' Hegel says that Spirit: 'wills to achieve its own liberation by fashioning nature out of itself; this action of Spirit is called philosophy ... The aim of these lectures has been to give a picture of nature in order to subdue this Proteus: to find in this externality only a mirror of ourselves, to see in nature a free reflection of Spirit'. In brief, Hegel demonstrates that the loftiest achievements of human Spirit are at root transformations of desire, though it may appear initially to be entirely negative, destructive and self-centred. And furthermore, this will to overcome otherness can be discerned in all of non-human or pre-human nature as well, for confronted with the opposition of an external world the animal merely destroys or gobbles up the external, but the distinction between human and animal is that humanity can master nature and absorb the external without thereby literally annihilating it. Your dog can quite readily consume its food, or masticate upon your slippers, but it is quite incapable of making the world its own through thought.

'Heaven on Earth', 1934, Jean Delville

But wait! If desire is at the root of all Spirit including the lower animal spirits, and to be truly human is not so much to be pursuing biological desires but desire itself, (one indeed may put it that the ego or the 'I' is a function of desire), and thereupon we are what we desire and consume, ('Man is what he eats', as Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, (1804 - 1872) said), and if all I desire is eating and copulating like a Bonobo monkey, and that is the entirety of my consumption, then what distinguishes me from a Bonobo engaged in equivalent activities? A ready answer may be that what makes a subject fully human is desiring things that transcend the world of natural desires, but what does that mean? What does it even mean to desire? What does desire give rise to??Does our desiring of things in the biological sphere rather confine and hobble us??

'Man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects, I call bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune, in whose power he so greatly is that often, though he sees the better for himself, he is still forced to follow the worse'.?

- Baruch Spinoza, (1632 - 1677)

But are we not also in bondage by desiring knowledge and wisdom?? How might we separate the enjoyment of things in the natural or physical sphere and the pursuit of things not of the natural or physical sphere??According to Plato, (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC), the philosopher is one that does not pursue the things of this world but chooses knowledge and wisdom, transcending the biological in pursuit of the mental or the philosophical, nobly attaining salvation through gaining release from the cycle of reincarnation rather than going to Tartarus that deep abyss and dungeon of torment and suffering where souls?are judged after death and where the wicked received divine punishment, as Plato explains in the 'Phaedo'. ?Is there in the dialectic of self-consciousness a similar conception, a contention that desiring only a negation of a concrete thing can grant us a transcendence of the biological?

We need to look at the discussion upon death and immortality in the 'Phaedo' more closely, the principal ideas forwarded are as follows:

1. The philosopher is forever pursuing death, for the body gets in the way of the soul’s search for knowledge, and death would bring about a separation of body and soul.

2. The philosopher endeavours to attain knowledge of the Ideas, those eternal Forms (see my article On Plato's Parmenides - Being and Non-Being), that are copied by individual things, but to gain such knowledge he or she must practice a kind of death, freeing the soul so that it can discover Ideas or Forms.

3. Most assuredly the soul survives the death of the body, for opposites are generated out of opposites, and life is the opposite of death.

4. Furthermore, we have certain ideas (such as the idea of equality) which could not have been acquired in this life, and therefore we must have existed, as souls, prior to being born, and we recollect the Ideas or Forms that we encountered prior to our birth.

'The Mourners', c. 1915, Evelyn De Morgan

The 'Phaedo', which takes its name from the narrator in the dialogue, is Plato’s philosophical and literary monument constructed in remembrance of the life and death of his master, Socrates, and which presents us with an exemplary point of entrance into the study of philosophy with its account of the end of the first member in the great triad in Greek thought as penned by the second. The philosophic way of life as Socrates and consequently Plato saw it is described, in the process explaining how the philosopher, so unlike other men and women in many ways, differs in addition through holding no fear of death. The account of the immortality of the soul extends from the fanciful myth about the various destinies of good and evil souls to what is perhaps Socrates', and assuredly Plato's, most fundamental theory, the doctrine of Forms. While the 'Phaedo' must be studied in conjunction with the other Platonic dialogues in order to complete the picture of Socrates as a man and as a philosopher, it cogently suggests the influence that both he and Plato together have exercised in the history of Western thought.

The work consists of one dialogue within another, as at the request of a friend, Phaedo recounts the conversation between Socrates and his companions and the final events of the day Socrates' perceived unjust death sentence is executed. The inner dialogue takes place principally between the master and two of the several followers present, Simmias and Cebes, and naturally enough the discourse turns to the true philosopher's attitude toward death, for given that Socrates appears willing to die and to justify this willingness, the question arises as to the legitimacy of suicide. Socrates' response is that in virtue of men and women belonging to the gods, the occasion of our death is in their hands and not ours. However, Cebes objects that if life is divinely directed its continuance is desirable and the voluntary escape from it would be folly, to which Socrates responds that he expects to enjoy the company of other good and wise gods and people after death. A stronger defense of his position is requested, however, and Socrates surprises his listeners by asserting that the philosopher is always pursuing death, and that it would hence be most inconsistent, now that death is at hand, to shun it. To which Simmias mockingly concurs that most people think the philosophic life is, and deserves to be, a kind of death, but he desires clarification, to which Socrates explains that the philosopher seeks and enjoys the pleasures of the body, those of food, drink, sex, and adornment, only to the extent that they are necessary to life, and beyond this despises them. The bodily senses, desires, and feelings hinder the soul’s search for knowledge of true existence, and thought is thereby clearest when the influence of the body is least felt, or when there is the greatest possible separation between body and soul, soul in this context including mind. And what is such separation, when fulfilled, but death itself? Hence the philosopher, whose object is truth beheld with the clear eye of the soul, not with the befuddled vision of the physical organ, is constantly practicing a kind of death.

In elaborating upon his position Socrates introduces this doctrine of Forms, variously described as essences, absolutes, and Ideas, although the last term does not have the connotation of the common English word and hence the others are preferable. For each class of objects and qualities, or at least for many classes, there is an absolute Form or essence which is the true nature and reality shared by particular members of the class. For instance, there is absolute Justice, Beauty, Goodness, Greatness, Health, Strength. A beautiful object is beautiful not in itself but by participation to some degree in the very essence of Beauty, thus each absolute is pure or self-identical, unique, eternal, and perfect in its kind since ultimately it is the kind in reality and not simply by definition for the sake of classification, albeit it may well serve the latter purpose for anyone who is inclined to rejects the Platonic metaphysics. A healthy man, for instance, becomes now more, now less healthy and eventually loses health altogether in death, but Health is what it is without relation to time, and particular things, as Plato explains elsewhere, are real only on a secondary level in virtue of the fact that they are changeable and perishable, they exist only because of the ideal patterns they so variously but never perfectly copy.

Socrates raises the question now as to how are such forms known. Certainly not, strictly speaking, by the senses, for with the eye we see only this or that imperfectly beautiful thing, or observe persons merely more or less just, whereas Beauty, Justice, and the other absolutes are adequately apprehended only by a grueling and laborious and purely intellectual process: '... he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought, sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each'. And yet if forms are known by mind alone, wisdom concerning true being can come to maturity only after death, when the mind is completely liberated, but it has yet to be established that the soul survives. Cebes declares the oft felt fear among people that upon bodily death the soul merely disperses into nothing, to which Socrates obligingly offers a number of considerations supporting his confidence in immortality, arguments varying markedly in plausibility for a modern reader and one may wonder whether a logical proof is really intended for the immortality of the soul, though phrases such as 'sufficient proof' and 'logical necessity' certainly are there to be found in the text.

'L'Idéal', c. 1912, Carlos Schwabe

It is to be observed, Socrates contends, that all things that are generated or which come into and pass out of being are generated from their opposites, and particular, as opposed to absolute, opposites give way to each other, whereby that which becomes weaker must have been stronger, the worse comes from the better, and so on. And so it is that we discover all through nature both opposite states and the processes of coming into them, for otherwise, if all things passed into conditions from which there was no return, the universe would become utterly static. Imagine, for instance, a world in which waking was followed only by sleeping, or in which the processes of composition were never varied by those of division. Having been granted this point Socrates argues that since life and death and living and dying are opposites, and it is certain that the living die, according to this universal law of nature the living must return from the dead, and therefore the dead must exist somewhere prior to return.

Cebes now suggests that the same implication follows from Socrates' account of knowledge as recollection, whereby knowledge of true being, that is to say, of the Forms, turns out to be a recognition of what was known in a previous existence. Consider one's comprehension of equality, for instance. If one were to perceive two similar objects one may judge that they are equal or nearly so, but how does one recognize this relative equality? Such a judgment presupposes a concept of equality in itself to serve as a standard for comparison, and the concept of perfect equality cannot be derived from sensory observation in virtue of the fact that physical objects are never precisely equal. At the same time, however, and here Socrates moderates the extreme rationalism of the earlier account of knowledge of absolutes, one is reminded of absolute equality by the sight of imperfectly equal things, sensation is hence a necessary but not a sufficient condition of this recognition. And yet since one has sensation at birth, knowledge of essences must be prior to the present life, it is recollection of what one had once known and had forgotten when the soul took on a body. It is clear therefore that pre-existence of the soul and that of the absolutes are equally certain.

Nonetheless, declare Simmias and Cebes, sufficient proof that the soul continues to exist after physical death is yet to be forthcoming, but Socrates reminds them that the latter argument, plus the one concerning opposites, does prove the point, for if the soul exists before birth, which is to say, in a state of death relative to bodily existence, and the living come from the dead, even as the dead come from the living, the soul therefore exists both before and after the various bodies into which it is born. And yet observing that Simmias and Cebes still indicate that quite natural human uneasiness concerning the soul's future, Socrates adds another and perhaps sounder argument that hinges upon comparison of the nature of the soul as compared to that of the body, and it concludes that if they are materially different there is no reason to assign them a common fate. In general the composite or compound is unstable, subject to change and hence to dissolution, whereas the uncompounded or simple must be indissoluble, as are the invisible, simple, self-existent, and unchanging forms. Comparison of body and soul demonstrates that body is like all other compound and perishable physical objects, but soul resembles the absolutes in some ways and presumably will share their permanence. This dichotomy of soul and body appears in the knowing process, for if the soul relies on sensation she is dragged down to earth, as it were, to the unstable and the confused, but if she relies upon her own reason she approaches the pure and the eternal. Communion with the immutable begets similarity: '...the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable'.

This conclusion leads Socrates to descriptions of the soul's fate after death which approach and finally cross the border between philosophy and fiction, but which, like many of Plato's myths, express allegorically significant hypotheses and profound insights (though Hegel recall regarded them as scientifically valueless). The soul's future, Socrates contends, will depend upon its degree of purity in the present, whereby those impure souls enthralled by love of sensual pleasures and by evil passions are so weighed down by the corporeal that they may be reincarnated in animals similarly miserable in nature, such as in asses or wolves. The moderately virtuous soul might be given the body of an admirable social animal such as the ant or the bee, or perhaps even another human body, but only those souls purified of all bodily taint through philosophy may enter immediately into the blissful company of the gods and escape further reincarnation. Philosophy is hence not merely an academic discipline or a profession, from the Platonic perspective it is a way of life and even the soul’s salvation. Socrates describes the soul as previously shackled to the body, hoodwinked by the senses, enslaved by its own desires, worst of all, it is deceived about true reality by opinions influenced by pleasure and pain, it mistakes violence of emotion for evidence of truth, whereas Philosophy offers release from this deception and teaches the soul to rely upon her own intellectual resources. Thus, 'she will calm passion, and follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true and divine'.

Following on from the attainment of such poetic heights that he reaches in this account, Socrates thereupon manifests the equanimity of the truly philosophical inquirer when Simmias and Cebes still have serious doubts and concerns that he encourages them to speak up about. Simmias' objection presupposes Pythagoras', (c. 570?– c. 495?BC), concept of the soul as a sort of harmony or attunement of the elements of the body, obtaining when these are in proper tension or proportion, and by analogy to his previous arguments, Socrates would have to argue that the harmony of a lyre, which harmony is also invisible, perfect, and divine, could survive the destruction of the instrument, but the absurdity of this suggests the absurdity of the belief that the soul exists when the body is destroyed. Cebes adds further that whilst the soul may survive several deaths and reincarnations, yet it is possible that it finally wears out as does a body that has survived the wearing of several coats.

'Muse with a Lyre', 1560-61, Paolo Veronese

These objections seem so cogent to the audience that had just now been persuaded by Socrates' train of thought, that a despair of the success of any argument whatever sets in, and yet Socrates warns his friends of the dangers of misology, of distrusting reasoning and logical debate, for just as one may become a misanthropist by overconfidence in humanity, followed by disillusionment, so may one learn to distrust all argument by accepting conclusions hastily and without sufficient attention to logic, only to discover their falsity later. And yet rather than adopting a cynically sceptical position that no arguments are valid, no truths about reality discoverable, one should think that the difficulty is one's lack of ability, which can be improved by further effort, and it is quite fallacious to attribute the invalidity of one's own thinking to reason itself, and hence it is folly to forfeit the very possibility of learning the truth.

Socrates then proceeds to answer Simmias' objection by demonstrating that it is inconsistent with previous and present admissions, for harmony or attunement is not prior to the elements organized or tuned, but the soul has been shown to exist prior to the body. Simmias cannot hold, therefore, both that knowledge is recollection and that the soul is harmony, and furthermore, harmony occurs in degrees, an instrument may be more or less in tune, but we do not think that souls are more or less souls either in themselves or relative to others. And furthermore, if the soul were a harmony, it could contain no vice, which is inharmonious, and consequently all souls would be equally good, which of course is absurd. And finally, if soul were a harmony of bodily elements, it would be dependent upon them, but as a matter of fact the soul, especially the wise one, acts as a governor of the body, and hence is sometimes out of harmony with it.

To answer Cebes' objection that the soul may eventually deteriorate and vanish, Socrates appeals once more to the doctrine of Forms to elaborate a theory of causation relevant to the problem. In his youth, he recalls, he studied physicalistic and mechanistic theories of causal explanation of human life and behaviour, but the detail and presumably the mutual inconsistencies) of these frustrated and confused him. A glimmer of hope appeared in the view of Anaxagoras, (c. 500?– c. 428?BC), that Mind, as universal rather than human, orders and causes all things, which philosophy Socrates thought would show that everything was ordered for the best. If one wished to discover the ultimate causes for the shape of the earth, the positions and movements of the heavenly bodies, one need only refer to the highest good which these arrangements serve, but to his chagrin Socrates found Anaxagoras falling back upon the familiar physical causes. And these offer partial but inadequate explanation of his own present behaviour, Socrates continues, for of course he is engaging in his present activities in prison by means of bones, muscles, and their functions, but these are not the true causes of his behaviour, which are that the Athenians have condemned him to die and he has thought it right to refuse escape and accept the penalty. Mechanistic philosophers disregard the distinction between conditions and causes, or between what Aristotle, (384–322?BC), was later to term efficient and final causes: 'of the obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing'. But given that Socrates contends that he has been unable to discover what the nature of the best is, he offers a substitute causal theory, and albeit his procedure of adopting it may appear overly rationalistic, further qualifications disclose much affinity to later scientific thought. His method is to select the theory judged most sound and then to accept or reject particular propositions by reference to it, but the original hypothesis is not wholly arbitrary, it can be justified either by derivation from an established theory, or, to judge from Socrates’ practice, by examining its consequences for any inconsistencies. With this explanation Socrates accounts for his present assumption of the theory of Forms.

An implication of the theory is that participation in the Forms accounts for the characteristics of objects, and Socrates hence insists that for him this is the only intelligible cause assignable. Indeed, it applies to the very processes of becoming, for there is 'no other way in which anything comes into existence except by participation in its own proper essence'. And two chief characteristics of Forms are uniqueness and simplicity, they cannot admit their opposites, and furthermore, some particulars are so constituted that it is impossible they should admit forms opposite to those especially characteristic of their own natures, for instance, the number two, having the Form Even, cannot remain two and admit the Form Odd. Upon the realisation that what renders body alive is soul and nothing else, it is apparent that soul has an essential relation to life and hence cannot admit its opposite, death, any more than fire can admit cold, and therefore, the soul again has been proved to be immortal, this time to the satisfaction of all those present.

It follows therefore that the soul is deserving of the greatest care in the present life, preparatory to the next, and Socrates proceeds to give an imaginative description of the details of life after death and the various regions good and evil souls will occupy, some of which to a Christian mind may appear to be counterparts anticipating his or her own traditions of heaven, hell, and even purgatory. Socrates adds, however, that: 'A man of sense ought not to say, nor will I be very confident, that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true'. The principle point is again that 'there is no release or salvation from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom'. That Socrates has by his own virtue and wisdom escaped the evil of fear of death is now abundantly evident, and once the discussion is finished and he has bidden his family goodbye, only Socrates among the entire assembly keeps his composure as the final preparations are made.

Admonishing his friends to restrain their sorrow which through Plato is somewhat catching even in our present times Socrates quaffs the cup of poison as cheerfully as if it were wine, and whether or not the reasoning associated with his attitude seems entirely valid, and some of it judged formally assuredly is not, nonetheless there is much in the Socratic teaching which is enduringly sound and recurrently fruitful. Some doctrines, such as that of the Forms, may be disregarded from a metaphysical point of view while renewed as logic or epistemology, but putting theory to one side who would controvert the value of Socrates' visionary courage, or fail to hope and desire it perpetuates itself in the human race, albeit for a satisfactory intimation of the master’s immortality of necessity one must go back to its original description delivered by his most celebrated disciple?

'Ascent of the Blessed', 1505/15, Hieronymous Bosch

The part of the 'Phaedo' in which Socrates explains his new method of hypothesis, although recognized as fundamental for understanding Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, has been interpreted in diverse ways and in modern times is frequently dismissed as attending merely to pseudo-problems. Gregory Vlastos, (1907 – 1991), thought that, with the clearing up of one fundamental misunderstanding the passage has much to commend it, a misunderstanding arising from the improperly considered custom of employing cause as a translation of the Greek aitia. One encounters the difficulty again in connection with Aristotle’s so-called four causes, only one of which, the efficient cause, is a cause in the sense of the word as used in the English language. Vlastos suggests that we can best preserve the extension of the Greek word if we reformulate expressions containing aitia as answers to why-questions, and in this way we make it clear that aitiai are not properly causes but rather are be-causes or reasons. Because it may point to an event, to a lawlike connection, to a purpose, or to an entailment, any one of which could be termed in Greek an aitia.

When Cebes, viewing the soul as a physical object, gave vent to the fear that like everything else in nature the soul must eventually waste away, Socrates told of his own youthful disappointment with the theories of naturalists, such as Democritus, (c. 460?–?c. 370 BC), who formulated an atomic theory of the universe, and Anaxagoras, a naturalism that makes use only of material and mechanical aitiai. Socrates then explained the new theory which he had devised according to which Forms or Ideas functioned as aitiai, and Vlastos regarded this as a significant new insight, for speaking through Socrates, Plato draws attention to the ambiguity of the concept of aitia, and sorted out its import in different categorial contexts. Unfortunately, interpreters of Plato have failed to recognise what he was up to and have accused him with the very fault which he was the first to expose. Aristotle, for example, says that in the 'Phaedo' Forms are treated like generative causes and he criticises Plato for making the Form Health, rather than the physician, the cause of the patient’s recovery. Modem scholars, Vlastos says, too frequently are inclined to make the same mistake.

As a basis for discussion, Vlastos takes the following statement: '...each of the Forms exists and it is in virtue of participating in them that other things are named after them'. Here, besides the relation, participation, three sets of variables are used, Forms, individual persons or things, and immanent characters which have the same names as their respective Forms. The hypothesis is that for any character F of any individual x there exists a Form O, and that x has the character F if and only if x participates in O. In the 'Phaedo', Socrates employs this hypothesis to deliver two answers to the question, 'Why is x F?' The first answer, which he calls the safe and simple-minded answer, offers the Form as the aitia, and this interpretation holds the solution for the series of perplexities with which philosophical naturalism had left Socrates confronted with. For instance, the puzzle of why things which were one and one, became two when placed together, this difficulty disappears once one sees that questions of arithmetic require different aitiai than do physical questions. If one call things two, it is in virtue of viewing of them as partaking in the Dyad, if we call them one, it is in virtue of viewing them as participating in Unity, not because of the distance between them, or their proximity. In general, one can speak of a figure as a square or of an object as beautiful or of a law as just only because of the ontological dependence of temporal things on eternal Forms. This dependence, however, is not a causal relation, for the Form Squareness does not bring squares into existence any more than the Form Ideal City brings into existence ideal cities. Although Forms are metaphysical aitiai, it is not their ontological status but their logical content that makes them useful in answering questions.

The safe but simple-minded answer to the question, 'Why is x F?', is, 'Because x participates in O'. A more clever and bolder answer is, 'Because x participates in T', when T 'brings on', or, as we might say, 'entails' O. Thus, 'Why is x odd?' could be answered, 'Because x is three', the reasoning being that because x is three it participates in Threeness, and because Threeness entails Oddness, then x must be odd. Other pairs of Forms mentioned are Fire-Heat and Fever-Sickness, and the answer is bold and clever because it does, in some fashion, connect physical causality with logical entailment. We infer, for example, that a man is sick because he has a fever. Does this mean that, for Plato, the Form Fever is the cause of a man’s being sick? Not directly, according to Vlastos. Plato is saying that causal connections in the physical world are what they are and are intelligible to us only because there exist incorporeal, immutable objects, the relations between which we can know.

That Plato’s analysis could hold no interest for the natural scientist Vlastos is quick to recognize, he also remarks that any attempt to find in the laws of nature the same necessity which obtains in formal reasoning is unpopular with philosophers in our times. But the atomist Leucippus, (fl. 5th century BC), had said that 'nothing happens at random, but everything by reason and by necessity', and Plato was correct in pointing out that if one looks for necessity in nature one will not find it by observing regularities. Even in modem times, says Vlastos, not all have agreed with David Hume, (1711–1776), that the laws of nature are radical contingencies, and he cites Brand Blanshard, (1892 – 1987), who contended that 'being causally connected involves) being connected by a relation of logical necessity'.

'Architecture, Painting and Sculpture Protected by Athena from the Ravages of Time', John Singer Sargent, 1921

Be that as it may some light may be cast upon the obscure and difficult passages through situating the dialogue in its proper historical and philosophical context, and Reginald?Hackforth,?(1887 - 1957), has denied that the fundamental purpose of the dialogue is to prove that the human soul is immortal, although it is of course plain enough that much of it is devoted to arguments designed to prove that very thesis. Nor is it to expound the doctrine of the Forms, although that too occupies a considerable amount of space in the dialogue. On the contrary, it is to extend and deepen Socrates' principal teaching, that a person's supreme concern is the watchful care of or attention paid to his or her soul, that is to say, the development of deeper insights into moral and spiritual values and application of those insights to individual conduct, such insights of course being attainable through philosophy, ash Socrates and Plato would have it, and are the conditions essential for genuine happiness.

The emphasis upon purification of the soul, with the concomitant doctrine of flight from the body and all material things, as well as contempt for the world that is perceived by the senses, is, according to Hackforth, not purely negative and does not lead to an extreme form of asceticism. By being fused with the doctrine of the Forms or Ideas, the principal doctrines of the 'Phaedo' lead to a rather different conception of human happiness than one would find in pure asceticism, whereby the soul’s proper activity is the apprehension of the Forms, the universals, and through that activity it achieves the only kind of joy or satisfaction of which it is truly capable. In order to reach the utmost pinnacle of such achievement, it is necessary for the philosopher to be rid of the fetters of the body, which merely impede the soul in its quest, hence, the renunciation of physical pleasures and desires and the training for death that Socrates recommends.

Hackforth thus contends that the ethical principles advocated in the 'Phaedo' are very individualistic, for that reason very much different from the concerns Plato displayed in the 'Republic', and he thus concludes from this and from other evidence that the 'Phaedo' was written some time before the 'Republic', and probably before the 'Symposium' as well, for in these perhaps later dialogues the concern shifts from exclusive pre-occupation with the welfare of the individual and his soul to social and political questions, such as the nature of justice in the state. Furthermore, the theories on the nature of the soul in the 'Phaedo' and the 'Republic' are quite different from one another. Whereas in the 'Phaedo' the soul is very much like the eternal Forms, simple, non-composite, and eternal, in the 'Republic' Plato goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the soul is composed of three distinct parts, each of them possessing different attributes and exercising different kinds of power or influence upon the whole.

Moral conflict is characterized in the 'Republic' as a kind of disharmony or discord between the various parts of the soul, each of them attempting to usurp a function more properly belonging to another, but in the 'Phaedo' moral conflict is conceived as a struggle between the pure, rational soul and the body, which is by its very nature irrational and shot through with passions and desires. In the 'Phaedo', the soul opposes the body’s irrational fears and desires, in the 'Republic', those fears and desires arise within the soul itself and must be controlled by its rational element. Furthermore, Hackforth discerns in the Phaedo a suggestion of Platonic mysticism, that is, of his theory that the soul’s activity goes beyond the mere cognition of its objects, the soul is also seeking to possess its objects and to satisfy a powerful desire for them. This desire for possession and unification is reminiscent of the kind of love, the union of the lover with the beloved, described so strikingly and dramatically in the 'Symposium' and again in the 'Republic', where Plato has Socrates inform how the philosopher approaches and is finally united with that which truly is, and yet this mystical idea is only hinted at in the 'Phaedo', but according to Hackforth its brooding presence is palpable.

Unlike many of the dialogues, the 'Phaedo' contains no conceited interlocutor who suffers deflation at the hands of Socrates, no Gorgias, no Thrasymachus, no Protagoras, no Polus. This is of course appropriate for the setting of the dialogue, which was a gathering of Socrates' most intimate associates, grieving already over the imminent execution of their great teacher. Hackforth observes that in contrast to the rapier like thrusts of Socrates' logic in other dialogues, he is depicted here as serene and confident, and the discussion proceeds in a quiet and sombre manner, except for occasional bits of quiet humour, as when Socrates responds to Cebes’s question as to the manner of his burial, 'Bury me as you like, if you can catch me'. Hackforth also notes that the myth toward the end of the Phaedo is designed to reinforce the fundamental point of the dialogue, the care and attention paid to the soul as the principal obligation of the philosopher. The intellectual and moral process of purging our souls from the taint of the body can help to bring about that unity of goodness and happiness which is the goal of the philosopher’s life, and the myth itself is similar in important respects to the myths about the judgment of souls in the 'Gorgias', the myth of Er in the 'Republic', and the myth of the supra-celestial region in the 'Phaedrus'. The myth in the 'Phaedo', Hackforth contends, is to extend our mental horizons beyond this life and beyond the small comer of the earth which we know from experience. The hollow in which people dwell, Tartarus, is comparable, in many important respects, to the cave that Plato describes in the 'Republic'.

Those who dwell in the hollow imagine that they are dwelling on the surface of the earth, and they suppose that the impure air they breathe is the heaven, while in fact the true surface of the earth, a much more beautiful place, is beyond their reach, and the true heaven is almost beyond their imagining. The true earth is the habitation of righteous souls that have not quite reached the state of perfection required for ascent to the ultimate reality, the highest and purest state of being. Unlike the myths of the 'Phaedrus' and the 'Republic', where three classes of souls are distinguished, that is, curable sinners, incurable sinners, and the righteous, this myth introduces five classes, the additional ones being those who are indifferently good and those who have been purified by philosophy and are therefore to be removed from the perpetual cycle of birth and death and rebirth. And here, according to Hackforth, comes the climax of the 'Phaedo's message: 'But now, Simmias, having regard to all these matters of our tale, we must endeavour ourselves to have part in goodness and intelligence while this life is ours; for the prize is glorious, and great is our hope thereof'.

'Die Barke des Charon', Otto Brausewetter, (1833-1904)

But wait! Something is missing here. Do we keep our identity after we die, is not all our experience ground upon physical interactions with a material world? To return to desire, may that assist in finding a solution to the problem of individuality in Plato’s theory of the afterlife. Presumably a philosopher maintains his or her identity after their demise, for it is then that they are able to pursue wisdom and knowledge, the very reason we should celebrate the separation of the soul and the body. But for this to be the case the soul, now free of bodily desires, must have the capability to?desire?wisdom and knowledge in the afterlife, for without such it could not pursue them, and yet desire necessitates the existence of an I, an ego, an individuality, for in desire the desiring thing becomes aware of itself as a subject when it becomes aware that it wants to possess the desired thing, in this case, wisdom and knowledge. I have my desires for food and bodily pleasures, I, a thing at this very instance, desire to eat, a thought leading to an awareness of?me?as the thing desiring to eat, an awareness of a subject, me, a desiring thing seeking multiple desires including the sources of wisdom and knowledge and for that to be possible I, this desiring thing, must needs make choices concerning what to pursue and what to ponder over, all of which implicates an individual subject. And placing such cogitations within a Platonic context one might declare that the afterlife does indeed entail an individuality as opposed to an individual entering into a union with a Whole and thereby losing its identity.????

One might also make something of the connection between a Platonic and Hegelian scepticism with regard to sensation, of bodily experiences interacting with a material world. In the section on 'Sense-certainty' in the 'Phenomenology' Hegel criticises the notion that we can acquire absolute knowledge from immediate sense experience. For instance, a bottle of Swedish Absolut Vodka. Were we to ask what it is, our senses inform us that it is a narrow necked transparent glass container within which is a rather enticing clear liquid, and there's the rub, for whenever I conceptualise what my senses are informing me about I put it into words and abstract thoughts. Sensation plays its part but the mental faculties are the principal players. Sensation on its own leads nowhere because it cannot be thought of without the use of reason, and in immediate sensation, (though recall for Hegel everything is mediated), I am not apprehending the object but a simple this or that that I refer to.

All kinds of anomalies and inconsistencies emerge once Sense-certainty is taken as knowledge, and furthermore another instance is the manner by which the particular object of immediate sensation contains the abstractions of universals, in particular space (how would a disembodied soul experience space?) from which point Hegel proceeds to Perception in anticipation of ir providing us with knowledge, and yer this necessarily fails also. For upon perceiving the bottle of Absolut Vodka I perceive a manifold of properties held together by a medium. I perceive clear liquid, within a narrow necked container, which is also glass, and so on, a unity that I call 'bottle'. And what is it, a multitude or a unity? How can I decide which one to favour? Perhaps the best I can do is to declare that it is a?thing?or a unity, and furthermore, in perception, the I and the object are involved, yet which one is essential? Which one delivers up knowledge to us? In brief, we do not know what is essential to perception, we do not know what the thing being perceived really is, and we do not know what we are.?Plato and Hegel share in a doubtfulness concerning immediacy (never possible in Hegel anyway)?and step forward into the realm of Self-consciousness.

So what of death? Hegel discusses upon this subject in the 'Philosophy of Nature' where in death and disease we discover that the individual is inadequate to express its universal nature. For instance, the death of a man or a woman demonstrates that his or her individuality cannot, in the end, fully or completely express the universal Humanity, or the human form. The individual is a specification of the universal, but all such specifications are finite and limited, and each is therefore overcome, in a manner analogous to how specific definitions of the Absolute are overcome dialectically in the 'Science of Logic'. In Nature the Idea expresses itself only as a series of imperfect and mortal organisms, and in conscious thought, the Idea implicit in Nature has become explicit and, somewhat in opposition to common sense as all true philosophy is, Hegel contends that this expression of the Idea is more adequate than the expression of the Idea in finite, living things.

Death and immortality were themes of crucial interest in the Germany of Hegel's time. The Romantics poet Novalis, (1772 - 1802), considered death as inextricably intertwined with life, and one's death as the supreme climax of one's life. One of his poems bears the title 'Longing for Death':

Praised be to us the eternal night,

Praised be our eternal sleep.of

The day indeed has made us warm

And our cares have made us weak.

Driven no more by a longing to roam,

We want to go back to our father’s home.

.........

What delays our return still?

Those we love are long at rest.

The course of our life is buried there,

And now we know only pain and stress.

We seek no more, we have no care,

Our heart is full – the world is bare.

Infinite and mysterious,

Sweet showers through us course –

A distant echo of our grief, it seems,

Rings out from an unknown source.

Our loved ones also pine in death,

And sent to us their longing’s breath.

A belief in immortality was prevalent amongst the most level-headed and moderate philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn, (1729 - 1786), who took the arguments for immortality presented in Plato's 'Phaedo' and re-worked them. Immanuel Kant, (1724 - 1804), considered immortality not to be a theoretically sustainable doctrine, but as a 'postulate of pure practical reason': since our will cannot become wholly adequate to the moral law in this life, it must become so by a progress to infinity, a requirement of which is eternal life. Kant argues that?we need to believe in immortality in order to secure the coherency of reason in promoting the highest good, which he defines as the synthetic connection between virtue and happiness, and while the postulate for God's existence aims to secure happiness, immortality is supposed to secure virtue. In a similar, though less equitable and disinterested, vein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749 - 1832), argued that great men, such as himself, cannot expect their activity to be cut short by death, so nature must provide for its continuance in an afterlife (but then again we ask what part of one's identity survives the passage from the material to the immaterial, what activity would he be engaging in, in the afterlife?) Another feature of the period was a growing awareness that attitudes to death varied over history, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, (1729 - 1781), argued that the Greeks feared death less than moderns do, they represented death not as a skeleton, but as a benign spirit, the brother of sleep. Johann Gottfried Herder, (1744 - 1803), responded that such benign portrayals of death were the Greeks' attempt to cope with their fear of it, but he broadly supported Lessing's view, as did Friedrich Schiller, (1759 - 1805), in his poem 'The Gods of Greece':

Ye in the age gone by,

Who ruled the world--a world how lovely then!--

And guided still the steps of happy men

In the light leading-strings of careless joy!

Ah, flourished then your service of delight!

How different, oh, how different, in the day

When thy sweet fanes with many a wreath were bright,

O Venus Amathusia!

Then, through a veil of dreams

Woven by song, truth's youthful beauty glowed,

And life's redundant and rejoicing streams

Gave to the soulless, soul--where'r they flowed

Man gifted nature with divinity

To lift and link her to the breast of love;

All things betrayed to the initiate eye

The track of gods above!

..........

Home! and with them are gone

The hues they gazed on and the tones they heard;

Life's beauty and life's melody:--alone

Broods o'er the desolate void, the lifeless word;

Yet rescued from time's deluge, still they throng

Unseen the Pindus they were wont to cherish:

All, that which gains immortal life in song,

To mortal life must perish!

'Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy', 1798, Charles Meynier

In his early writings Hegel had argued that the ancients were less afraid of death, which derived from their close identification with the city-state, and he contrasted death and the dead sharply with life and the living, especially in metaphorical characterizations of, for instance, the Jewish law as dead in contrast to the living love and faith advocated by Christ, but these were early writings and he subsequently went on to consider death and the confrontation with death as an essential constituent of life itself, for death is sublated in life, as is apparent in again putting death to metaphorical use in the 'Phenomenology' where he explains how the philosopher must take account of the dead abstractions of the understanding, and not simply discard them, in virtue of the fact that the life of the spirit is not the life that shies away from death and keeps well clear of devastation but rather the life that endures death and maintains itself in it:

'... the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to, something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being'.

This is evident also in his literal treatment of death, for like the Stoics, in particular Seneca, (4 BC - 65 AD), Hegel saw a person's capacity to die as conferring upon him or her a freedom from compulsion that he or she would otherwise lack. In the Lord and Bondsman dialectic the combatants in the struggle for recognition displays and confirms their self-consciousness, their bare self-awareness as opposed to the contingencies of life and existence, by their risk of death, and subsequently the defeated Bondsman derives a similar benefit from a fear of death at the hands of the Lord. Hegel regards death and the rites associated with it as conferring a significant universality upon the mundane life of the dead individual, albeit there are apparent exceptions, the terror of the French Revolution for instance, the 'meaningless death, the pure terror of the negative, that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it out'. The guillotine as it happens was the only resolution of the conflict that afflicted revolutionary France, between the universal will and self-enclosed, particular, and particulate, individuals:

'The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.'

Initially however this bare, pointless death is appropriate to the bare individuals who succumb to it, and secondly, the fear of this death, the absolute Lord, makes possible both the restoration of a differentiated order that followed the revolution in France, and the turn to Kantian morality that emerged in Germany. Death as is said is sublated into life. Hegel was especially interested in the dramatic deaths of great persons, as Friedrich H?lderlin, (1770 - 1843), had been enthralled by the death of Empedocles, (c. 494?– c. 434?BC), who was reputed to have thrown himself into the crater of Etna either as proof of divine status or to produce the impression that he had risen up among the gods, a plan that was given away by the emergence of one of his shoes from the volcano. And yet Hegel was primarily concerned with the deaths of Christ and of Socrates, the latter's enigmatic last words: 'We owe a cock to Asclepius', that is to say, we owe an offering to the god of healing for the cure effected by death of our bodily affliction, fascinated Hegel from his schooldays. To the unbeliever these deaths may appear similar, a martyr's death unjustly inflicted upon a wise man, yet Christ's death, Hegel contended, had a theological and metaphysical significance that Socrates' death lacked.

It presents in an intuitive form the reconciliation of the dichotomy between God and the world, for on the one hand God appears in a finite form and undergoes a painful death, which reveals that God himself involves finitude and negation, and on the other hand, his undergoing and then overcoming death to which all men are subject demonstrates that a human's Spirit can triumph over death, his or finite and contingent individuality being sublated or transfigured into godlike universality. Hegel anticipates Nietzsche in saying 'God is dead' in the 'Phenomenology' in his discussion of the Unhappy Consciousness, (that is, 'one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as sef-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature of itself'.) :

'The Unhappy Consciousness ... is ... the tragic fate of the certainty of self that aims to be absolute. It is the consciousness of the loss of all essential being in this certainty of itself, and of the loss even of this knowledge about itself-the loss of substance as well as of the Self, it is the grief which expresses itself in the hard saying that 'God is dead'.'

And yet God's survival of death is the death of death, for death refers here both to death in the literal sense and its significance for our lives, and to the negative in general, the death of death standing for the negation of the negation, which spirit is, for Spirit involves the overcoming or sublation of our natural and immediate will and consciousness, an overcoming that is both a metaphorical death and in part effected by the prospect of actual death, but the subjective Spirit survives this death to ascend to the essential universality of objective spirit, that is to say, social and political life, and absolute spirit, that is, art, religion and philosophy, the death of death.

Hegel's account of Christ's death may well suggests that he believed humans to be immortal, and he gives some space to the immortality of the soul in non-Christian religions, affirming that their views of God and of immortality go hand in hand. He asserts that the Spirit (Geist) is immortal, but adds that it is not of endless duration, as mountains are, but eternal. Otherwise, Hegel seldom mentions immortality, and, even if he believed in it, clearly had little interest in it. Some of his followers, for instance Carl Friedrich G?schel, (1784 - 1861), writing on immortality argued that individual immortality is a consequence of Hegel's system, yet others, such as Feuerbach, also writing about death and immortality, and Alexandre Kojève, (1902 - 1968), argued that it is at odds with his system. Kojève accepted Hegel's connecting of God with immortality and argued that Hegel rejected both, while Feuerbach thought of God and immortality as distinct issues, and argued that personal immortality conflicted with Hegel's theism.

'Pluto', 1909, Franz von Stuck

Alas however there are very good reason reasons for doubting that individual immortality is compatible with Hegel's system, for to begin with Hegel, while acknowledging the reality of time itself, considered atemporal eternity to be prior to time and that the essence of things is eternal rather than temporal, and yet if men and women survive death that which survives is normally considered as what is essential to them, and this, on Hegel's view, will be eternal rather than of endless duration. And yet genuine immortality requires persistence in time rather than eternity without duration and the immortality in the sense of eternity that Hegel claims for Spirit amounts only to humanity's ability to abstract from his or her spatio-temporal position and study such non-temporal subjects as logic, and to the universal, spiritual significance that a person achieves by his death. And furthermore, significant and valuable immortality is excluded by Hegel's aversion to spurious infinity, (that is, the one in which the operation to overcome finiteness always remains the same, repeated ('n+1') and never arrives at its destination, its end, it never reaches genuine infinity), and a life cannot acquire import from the indefinite postponement of its ending, but only from a significant ending, an ending that raises the life, with all its individual contingencies, to spiritual universality. This involves not only the death itself, but the funeral rites and memorials by which the living, for instance Antigone, honour their dead, for instance Polyneikes, her brother. (See my article Fabled by the Daughters of Memory, part four).

And even further, on Hegel's view, conflict and opposition are required to keep human beings alive and awake, self-consciousness emerges from conflict, men and women die when they become too contented with their environment, nations die when they are reluctant to wage war, and perpetual peace among states would mean the death of the state. If there is a Hegelian afterlife, it must therefor involve more conflict than the afterlife as imagined by Socrates or the traditional Christian heaven. And yet even further, a person's death is, on Hegel's view, deeply connected with the course of his or her life, that is, a person is responsible for his or her death, not only if he or she dies of sophisticated contentment with his or her surroundings, but even if he or she dies of an apparently contingent illness or accident. This of course is dependent in part upon his belief that causes cannot have an effect on healthy living or spiritual creatures, and he additionally argues that the death of states or societies is invariably the result of internal decline rather than of external impacts. Death completes one's life, it does not cut short a flourishing life or prevent one from doing things, since one dies only when one has nothing more to do, and nothing more to do in an afterlife, either.

And yet further, on the majority of views of it the afterlife is not a mere continuation of this life, but releases us from dependence upon material factors, and gives us more free space for our activities, thought, love, moral improvement, and so on, and Hegel rejects this sharp contrast between the material and the spiritual realms, for the material realm and our dependence upon it is sublated and idealized by the realms of objective and of absolute Spirit which mediate the sharp dichotomy between soul and body, or reason and desire, so characteristic of Platonic philosophy and subsequently of Kantian philosophy. Spirit is not hobbled or impeded by matter, it possesses in this life all the free play required for its activities. And yet even further, personal immortality presupposes that an individual is sufficiently distinct from its social context, for its survival outside that, and perhaps any other, social context to be conceivable, valuable and significant, and Hegel, though it would be simplifying things overmuch to deny that he was an individualist, such subjective freedom as he permitted had to be embedded in a culture and overseen by a state if it is to be meaningful or valuable, for detached from all society one would be barely human unable to think, speak or act in a recognizably human way, and so the survival of a human being bereft of all trace or memory of a human society is hardly devoutly to be wished for nor even intelligible or coherent.

Finally, Hegel it is up for debate whether Hegel's philosophy is guilty of historicism a somewhat vague and useless word anyway, see my article Fabled by the Daughters of Memory, part eight, but his emphasis upon history is certainly at odds with immortality, for no one can leap beyond his or her age, which forbids us to speak in any detail, whether prophetically or prescriptively, about the future, and which also excludes significant discourse about an afterlife. A person is too deeply embedded in and moulded by his historical situation to be reincarnated into a different historical situation or to persist outside history in a community of pure spirits. 'To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy, because what is is reason', wrote Hegel in the 'Philosophy of Right'. 'As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes. If a theory transgresses its time, and builds up a world as it ought to be, it has an existence merely in the unstable element of opinion, which gives room to every wandering fancy'. He does allow for the possibility of pure thinking, in which I abstract myself from my historical and social context in order to engage in logic, in timeless thought about the nature of things, though in doing so, I lose all sense of myself as a distinct individual whose survival is possible or desirable. What matters really is the persistence not of myself as an individual, but of the interpersonal structures of objective and of absolute Spirit, to which I as an individual am making and continue to make my contribution, and then I die when I have nothing more to offer.

'For he remembered that they?were but?flesh; a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again'.

- Psalm 78:39

'Socrates in Prison', Abraham Abildgaard, (1743 - 1809)

Contemplating his immortal soul in the eternal hereafter while in a cramped and gloomy cell.