Platos Phaedo Is A Dialog Between Phaedo, Cebes, And Simmias Depictin

Plato's Phaedo is a dialog between Phaedo, Cebes, and Simmias depicting Socrates explanation as to why death should not be feared by a true philosopher. For if a person truly applies oneself in the right way to philosophy, as the pursuit of ultimate truth, they are preparing themselves for the very act of dying. Plato, through Socrates, bases his proof on the immortality of the soul, and it being the origin of our intellect. Several steps must be taken for the soul to be proven immortal. First the body and all the information acquired though it must be discredited. For without the question being addressed of whether sensory information can be trusted, looking inwards towards the soul and the intangible for the essence of truth would be absurd. Plato must prove through Socrates that this is in fact so, For without this his legacy would be one of being condemned to death for committing a grievous crime. Not as a philosopher being granted a release from the body to achieve ultimate know ledge. The pursuit of philosophy, to Socrates, involves the denial of the body's desires due to their distraction to any intellectual engagement. For the acquirement of knowledge is an intellectual pursuit, one that the body confuses with faulty sensory information, Plato says through Socrates, "Now take the acquisition of wisdom; is the body a hindrance or not, if one takes it into partnership to share an investigation? What I mean is this: is there any certainty in human sight and hearing, or is it true, as the poets are always dinning into our ears, that we neither hear or see anything accurately?" (1) What we perceive though the senses has to be quantified constantly by the intellect. For example, a man seen in the distance is mistaken to be a woman, when the mistake is realized we do not jump to the conclusion that a woman just mysteriously changed into a man. Our intellect makes the correction that it was always a man, and it was actually a visual error that made him seem female. Distance or any other means of creating ambiguity leads us to differentiate between what we experience and what we know to be actually happening. If a differentiation has to take place between the crude sensory information and what we view as reality, than the truth or meaning within an object is not held within the sensory perception of it. "Well, have you ever apprehended them with any other bodily sense? By "them" I mean them all, including tallness or health or strength in themselves, the real nature of any given thing ? what it actually is. Is it through the body that we get our truest view of them ? Isn't it true that in any inquiry you are likely to attain more nearly to knowledge of your object in proportion to the care and accuracy with which you have prepared yourself to understand that object in itself?" (2) Besides the processing of inaccurate information, the temptations and desires of the body are so strong and numerous that the philosopher "never gets an opportunity to think." (3) The functions of the body that are being described as distractions and contradictions are in fact the fundamental processes of life. To view these as burdensome is to perceive the functions of life, those of physical necessity as well as joy and contentment, as an annoyance. A nagging that would be appreciated only if removed. Thus, putting the soul at the center of the definition of what we are, that which is seeking wisdom, in short the essence of humanity. Thus, if the body is only a distraction to thought, and intellectual investigation is the only way to achieve wisdom and knowledge of an object in itself, then the separation of the intellect from the burdens of the body is the only way to achieve absolute clarity of thought. "Is death nothing more or less than this, the separate condition of the body by itself when it is released from the soul, and the separate condition of the soul by itself when released from the body? Is death anything more than this?" (4) So death becomes the pinnacle of intellectual discovery and not the