64. If you wake up hungry, you'll always sit down hungry?
65. Don't drink except when you're thirsty. (William Penn was not a Boy Scout.)
66. Not getting drunk is good.
67. Sometimes drinking strong drinks is good for you.
68. The most common things are the most useful. (Not actually a paraphrase.)
69. Don't overuse rare things.
70. Don't waste things.
71. Don't tell people to do anything you wouldn't do yourself.
72. Too much of anything is bad.
This feels like it'd be better split into 2 or 3 topics. Also, one or two spots where it's unclear if he's talking about drinking anything or drinking liquor. I think he's far enough in time to be past the "all drinks are alcohol" phase.
Topic List: Ignorance, Education, Luxury, Inconsideration, Disappointment And Resignation, Murmurs, Censoriousness, Bounds of Charity, Frugality or Bounty, Discipline, Industry, Temperance
Went to a used bookstore today and tracked down Volume One of T5FSOB! It's the Ben Franklin one, so pretty high on my list. They had about half a dozen volumes. I'd like to get a full set someday, but I don't really have anywhere good to put them. If I found them in good condition for a good price I'd go for it. Otherwise, I'll wait until I have five feet of shelf available.
Summary: A frame story for a knob slobbering wall of text.
Commentary: I've written before about how much I hate the dialogue as a format, and I think Phaedo does a great job of demonstrating this.
First of all, the entire concept of a dialogue is usually more of just an awkward frame story. The two characters don't usually add anything particular to what could've been an essay. In this case, we get about two pages of them talking before Phaedo starts the intro to the intro of his long awkward story.
The awkwardness is the second thing. The Apology while disagreeable in content, is generally pleasantly written. I liked Jowett's translation, although I can see how Grube's might be more appropriate for an intro course or whatever. I looked at about a half dozen editions/translations of the Phaedo, and they all have awkward constructions like:
ECHECRATES: What was the manner of his death, Phaedo? What was said or done? And which of his friends were with him? Or did the authorities forbid them to be present—so that he had no friends near him when he died?
Not only does no one talk like this in real life, but it's also unnecessarily wordy. You could probably cut around half of it without even going particularly skimpy.
"How did he die? What happened? Did he have anyone with him, any friends, or did they make him die alone?"
Wow, that was easy.
And, of course, it's not a dialogue unless the listener is just absolutely orally worshiping the main speaker:
ECHECRATES: You will have listeners who are of the same mind with you, and I hope that you will be as exact as you can.
OMG Phaedo, you're as good as Socrates! Not a high bar.
Anyway, after this threeish pages, Phaedo starts his story. He attempts to word for word explain exactly what was said and done. That means that about half of this "dialogue" is one uninterrupted speech by one of the characters. Why do a dialogue at all if you're not going to have them talk to each other!?
He's on a mission from god to annoy people and make poor decisions.
Summary: Socrates is a mopey dipshit.
Commentary: I really think the last couple pages of this piece sum up why Socrates is such a loser.
For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living - that you are still less likely to believe. And yet what I say is true, although a thing of which it is hard for me to persuade you. Moreover, I am not accustomed to think that I deserve any punishment. Had I money I might have proposed to give you what I had, and have been none the worse. But you see that I have none, and can only ask you to proportion the fine to my means. However, I think that I could afford a minae, and therefore I propose that penalty; Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minae, and they will be the sureties. Well then, say thirty minae, let that be the penalty; for that they will be ample security to you.
Delayed gratification is a hard concept for Socrates. Surely, if he truly thinks he's on some divine mission he should recognize that laying low for a couple months or a year to continue his work would be superior to dying now and doing none of it. It's not like he's making any kind of effective statement by martyring himself. I feel like when this story gets retold we hear that Socrates refused to let his friends try to pay a fine for him, but apparently not.
But really, the most important paragraph is this one on the next to last page:
Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.
According to Socrates, there are two possibilities after death:
1. Sleepy nothingness
2. Philosophers' Teaparty
#2 is assinine. The idea that if there is an afterlife that's definitely what it's going to be is absurd (especially from the man who claims to know nothing). It's not even in line with (my understanding of) Greek's general beliefs at the time. Further proof of his heresy, I guess.
But #1 is what really reveals the whole game for him. Socrates would rather sleep forever than actually live a life, and he thinks that's how most people feel. I'm not going to pretend I know how most people in ancient Greece felt, and there are certainly days where I would rather not get out of bed (same as anyone). But to say that that would truly be better than the vast majority of the days of your life says one of three things:
1. You live in some absolute hellscape. This seems unlikely, no one else in Athens at the time is writing treatise on how everyone in the city should just off themselves.
2. You've got some serious depression. Sucks that Socrates lived a couple millennia before SSRIs, I guess. (Not that he'd have taken them.)
3. You're just a fucking loser. And he apparently thinks everyone is.
I've got whatever mental health issues, but I feel like even in my shittiest, most depressed episodes I never went, "Everyone is so miserable they'd be better off sleeping forever!" I might've felt that way about me but I was at least lucid enough to recognize I was an outlier.
Summary: Socrates is a lazy asshole, but he kind of has a point.
Commentary: The last chunk of Socrates's defense has two main points:
1. Why doesn't Socrates become a politician/advisor if he's going to go around trying to "not teach" people all day.
This is a fair point, and I'd point Socrates to the sections in Fruits of Solitude on discipline. He talks about a voice that tells him not to do stuff. Most decent philosophy talks about how to not listen to that voice, but whatever, he's Socrates.
2. If he's corrupting the youth so much, why aren't the older youths that I corrupted and/or parents complaining about him?
Assuming this is true, and all the criticism is being made by the same couple guys, a fair point. I don't know if that is true though.
