Argument from recollection in Phaedo is self-illustratory

Plato impresses me not just with his ideas, but by his writing craftsmanship. In line with his definition of philosophy as a practice, a process, both content and form of his writing contribute to its message. What's said is important, but how it's said adds another layer to the meaning, sometimes illustrative, sometimes adding a twist of depth. In this post I'd like to share some of these findings in Phaedo.

Phaedo is a dialogue about the immortality of the soul, capturing the final hours of Socrates. Within the dramatic time of the dialogue, he is convincing his friends Simmias and Cebes that philosophy is a "practice for dying", preparing us to leave our bodies and be released from its inconveniences, enabling us to finally see things for what they are, clearly. So, the soul is immortal, death is not to be feared, but welcomed when it comes (not sooner though, later Socrates adds that gods should decide when our time is over).

Socrates gives three arguments for the immortality of the soul, here I'd like to focus on the argument from recollection, as it has a fascinating quality of illustrating itself on three levels. To reveal how exactly, let's start by recollecting the argument itself.

Suppose you are looking at two stones, and they seem so similar to you that you are inclined to judge them as two equal stones. However, in other context, from another angle, you might judge them unequal. Maybe they have equal weight, but differ by size, or shape, or color. In sensible world, comparisons are inherently imperfect: they are unstable, context-dependent, approximate.

But to tell that the equality in sensible world is imperfect means to think about a standard – some perfect equality, compared to which the "real world equality" falls short. But what is this standard, the perfect equality, and where did we get an idea of it?

Socrates argues that the idea of perfect equality can not be based on experience, because a perfect equality is an abstraction. It does not exist in the sensible reality, and it belongs to an entirely different ontological category. He calls such objects Forms.

From this, Socrates concludes, that we should have known equality from before our birth, but then apparently forgotten. Your soul knows Equality, and your soul existed before your mortal body. As you live and gather sensory experience, this experience reminds you of the forgotten knowledge through the similarity – like the lackluster sensory equality reminds you of a perfect equality. This enables the recollection.

The Equality is one of the Forms – eternal, unchangeable objects belonging to the ideal realm of Forms. Each Form is, in layman's terms, like an essence of a kind of things on Earth. In Plato's writings, Socrates repeatedly mentions that our souls possess all knowledge of Forms but they have forgotten it as they got embodied on Earth. So, we need to be reminded of it.

Socrates notes, how asking Simmias or Cebes a well formulated question about the nature of the Form of Equality produced an immmediate answer. He engages them in Socratic questioning: asking and guiding them to the knowledge of universal truths they have already had in their souls. When Simmias and Cebes are performing the recollection themselves, under his guidance, the dialogue illustrates the point of recollection on the second level. Show, and tell.

Funnily enough, before the argument starts, in 73b, Simmias claims that he knows the argument but asks Socrates directly to remind him of it – very tongue in cheek from Plato. Socrates indeed reminds Simmias of the argument, but in two different senses: directly, by stating the argument that Simmias heard but "forgot"; and by teaching it to Simmias, which is equivalent to reminding Simmias of the truths his soul knew all along. Unfortunately, as I do not read ancient Greek, I can't be sure to which extent the wordplay was intentional.

This second possible meaning of remind raises an interesting question: if Simmias is recollecting the lost knowledge, it must have to do with one of the Forms, but which one? At first I was inclined to think that the knowledge is about the world of Forms, therefore assuming that the world of Forms is a Form itself. This, however, seems to be a debatable point among Plato scholars, and for a good reason. Plato did not leave us a clear account on it, so we would have to deal with nuances such as: does the Form of Forms contain itself (think Russel's paradox)? Do we need a Form to explain what's in common between the Form of the World of Forms and individual forms, and thus start an infinite regress?

A better answer might be to say that Simmias learns something about the world of Forms, which is related to all Forms, therefore gets into the domain of knowledge accessible by recollection. Or, perhaps, it's about the Form of Man or Form of Human Being, specifically, which was mentioned in another dialogue, Parmenides. Throughout the entirety of the dialogue, Simmias and Cebes learn about what it is to be a man, how we are related to our bodies and souls, what is it to live and to die. The argument from recollection is a part of the picture, elucidating the mechanism by which we recollect the forgotten knowledge of Forms, accessible to our soul. Simmias and Cebes learn about it, but also experience it firsthand.

Through the dialogue form, the readers are witnessing the process, but also guided through the same recollection process as Simmias and Cebes. You too did, in your soul, know the argument all along, you just needed a reminder. This is the third level, and here the text breaks the fourth wall.

Indeed, we are unable to engage with the text interactively, as we could with a teacher. Socrates critiques the stale quality of texts in a different dialogue, Phaedrus, which is, ironically, a written text itself. In Phaedo, however, we see clearly, that even a written text can actively engage reader in a process that leads to interesting outcomes for them, very much like a teacher does.

The recollection argument has a unique property: the very act of understanding this argument is itself an act of recollection. To grasp why sensible equals are deficient compared to the Form of Equality, the reader must already possess and use the very concept of perfect Equality that the argument claims we've recollected from prenatal existence. Within this framework, the understanding is not about recollection – it is recollection.

Unlike pedagogical texts that invite optional engagement, or rhetorical texts that persuade through technique, the Phaedo makes its central claim self-exemplifying: understanding requires exercising the very capacity for abstract thought that the argument attributes to recollection. The form doesn't just illustrate the content – it is the content first revealed, and then made an embodied experience. Perhaps, the highest expression of the art of writing.