Moses Mendelssohn’s Phaedon is a philosophical dialogue in the Platonic mould, written in German in the eighteenth century and translated into English by Charles Cullen of the Middle Temple in 1789. It imitates Plato’s Phaedo—the account of Socrates’ last hours before drinking the hemlock—but its author says plainly in his preface that he has discarded Plato’s “superficial and almost chimerical” proofs of immortality and made Socrates speak as a philosopher of the Enlightenment. The book opens with a short life of Socrates and then gives the prison dialogue itself, in which the condemned man argues with two young friends, Simmias and Cebes, about whether the soul survives the body.
The preface sets the terms of the whole enterprise. Mendelssohn does not examine the Greek philosopher’s grounds at all; he offers the arguments a reason-seeking Socrates would find convincing today, and he asks particular attention to proofs drawn from “the harmony of moral truths,” which he claims not to remember reading elsewhere. The biography that follows is a portrait of a man who turned philosophy from the study of nature toward the study of man—Cicero’s Socrates who called philosophy down from heaven into cities and homes—and who paid for the reform with poverty, ridicule, and finally his life.
Cullen’s Dedication and Mendelssohn’s Preface
Charles Cullen of the Middle Temple, writing in July 1789, opens the volume with a dedication to the Right Honourable Henry Dundas, presenting the book as a work begun by an ancient philosopher and finished by a modern one, in which a manly character is drawn for the reader’s benefit; he offers it as thanks for Dundas’s respect and protection. The preface then sets the terms of the enterprise. Mendelssohn imitates Plato’s Phaedon, but he will not lean on Plato’s arguments for immortality, which he finds superficial and nearly chimerical. He trusts instead to modern lights, and he makes Socrates speak as a philosopher of the eighteenth century would speak. The Greek’s own grounds are left unexamined; what is offered are the proofs a truth-seeking Socrates would accept today. Chief among them is a demonstration drawn from the harmony of moral truths, which the author says he does not recall meeting elsewhere and which he believes must convince anyone who grants his principles. A short life of Socrates is prefixed to the dialogue.
The Statuary’s Son Who Left the Workshop
Socrates, called the wisest and most virtuous of the Greeks, was born at Athens in the district of Alopece, in the fourth year of the seventy-seventh Olympiad, the son of Sophroniscus, a statuary, and Phaenarete, a midwife. He learned sculpture under his father, and many authors attribute to him the clothed Graces standing behind the Temple of Minerva. After his father’s death he kept at the craft, more from necessity than inclination, until about his thirtieth year, when Crito, an Athenian of high birth, saw his talents, drew him away from art, and introduced him to philosophers. The contrast is put sharply: art imitates life with lifeless substances, while wisdom imitates the infinite by means of the finite. Socrates studied under Archelaus, Anaxagoras, Prodicus, Evenus, Isymachus, and Theodoras, with Crito supplying his needs. He began with natural philosophy, the fashionable pursuit at Athens, then turned reason back from the investigation of nature to the contemplation of man. Cicero’s formula is invoked: Socrates first called philosophy down from heaven, planted it in cities and homes, and made men examine their own actions and the nature of good and evil. Like most reformers, he set no just bounds to his system and could speak contemptuously of the sublime sciences.
The Sophists, Potidea, and the Plague Camp
The reputed learned men of the day, who propped up popular prejudice and superstition with plausible false arguments, took the name of Sophists, and their conduct disgraced it. They taught the young in public and private, mixing false political tenets and fables into showy rhetoric, charging heavily, and keeping on good terms with the priesthood—live and let live. Their open theory was that everything may be proved or refuted; their concealed practice was to exploit their own superiority and other people’s folly. Their public morality was pernicious and their politics subversive of human rights, freedom, and happiness. Entangled with the prevailing religion, they made reform dangerous. Socrates had to conquer the prejudices of his own education, enlighten ignorance, refute sophistry and calumny, endure poverty, contend against established power, and dispel the dark terrors of superstition, all while handling feeble understandings gently. At thirty-six he bore arms against the Potideans, a Thracian town in revolt. He hardened his body and exercised his soul in courage, won the palm of military prowess by the unanimous voice of his rivals, and gave it to Alcibiades, whom he loved; Alcibiades confessed that Socrates had saved his life in battle. At the winter siege of Potidea he walked barefoot over the ice in his usual dress. During the plague that spread from Athens to the camp, Diogenes Laertius and Aelian report that Socrates alone escaped infection—evidence of a strong constitution and temperance. Aulus Gellius records that he once stood fixed in thought for twenty-four hours with an unaltered look. Such reveries bordered on enthusiasm, but an innocent enthusiasm, founded neither on pride nor on hatred of mankind.
The Midwife of Understanding
Returning home, Socrates set himself against sophistry and superstition, teaching in streets, walks, baths, private houses, and workshops. He discoursed on right and wrong, on God’s providence, on the duties of citizen, father, and husband—not arrogantly, but as a friend seeking truth through simple questions. He compared himself to his mother: as she no longer bears children but helps others give birth, so he acted as midwife to his friends, questioning until the hidden fruit of understanding came to light. Against the sophists he would applaud, then put slight indirect questions they answered out of pity; multiplying his questions, he cut off their long harangues, forced accurate definitions, and drew absurd conclusions from their false premises until they grew impatient and answered with invectives. He bore their rudeness calmly until the absurdities became manifest to the shallowest of their own hearers, making them ridiculous before their scholars.
The Gods on Trial and The Clouds
He reprobated false tenets that led openly to immorality—such as the fable writers who imputed weakness, injustice, and scandalous passions to the gods—exposing their pernicious consequences to public ridicule before sophists, priests, and common people. On providence, the government of God, the reward of the good and the punishment of the wicked, he was never reserved or doubtful, and he sealed his confession with death. Merely theoretical falsehoods with no dangerous influence on morality met no opposition from him; he assented to prevailing opinions and observed the established forms and ceremonies. After his return from an absence, his enemies formed a party and hired the comic writer Aristophanes to compose a ludicrous piece exposing Socrates to public ridicule and hatred, sounding out popular sentiment before a more decisive stroke. The farce, The Clouds, had Socrates as its principal character, with the actor imitating his dress, walk, gestures, and voice. Socrates usually attended the theatre only for Euripides’ plays; on the day this pasquil was brought out he was in the audience, and hearing strangers enquire for the original of the abused Socrates, he stepped forward mid-performance and stood where all could compare him with the copy. The audience could no longer be moved by its ridiculous incidents, and the piece failed. The poet revised it and brought it out the following year with no better fortune; the philosopher’s enemies saw they must wait for a more favorable opportunity.
Alcibiades, the Genius, and the Unburied Dead
The war with the Boeotians was scarcely over when a new army had to be mustered against the Lacedaemonian general Brasidas, who had taken several places in Thrace, including Amphipolis. Despite the danger his last absence had exposed him to, Socrates did not withhold his service; this was the last time he left his native city, and from then until death he never went beyond Athenian territory. He devoted himself to the youth of Athens, inculcating love of virtue by precept and example. A great admirer of beauty, he paid much regard to his friends’ personal beauty, saying a fair form bespeaks a fair soul, and when the latter does not fulfill the expectation, the virtue of the former is lost; he took pains to make men’s insides correspond with the fairness of their outsides. He was attached to none so much as Alcibiades, a youth of uncommon beauty and great talents but an imperious, fiery temper; Socrates followed him everywhere and engaged him in conversation to restrain his ambitious and voluptuous passions by friendly admonition and gentle reproof. Plato puts expressions into his mouth that seem almost amorous, which gave rise to the later accusation of criminal intercourse with the young. But his enemies themselves—Aristophanes in his comedy and Melitus in his impeachment—offer not the smallest insinuation of the kind.
Virtue as Purification, Not Exchange
Socrates begins by redefining virtue itself. True virtue, he tells Simmias and Cebes, is a sanctification of manners and a purification of the heart—not a trading of one passion for another. Justice, sobriety, courage, and wisdom do not consist in abandoning one vice only to embrace its opposite. He praises the forefathers who instituted the Teletes, the feasts of perfect expiation, as wise men, since those rites teach that whoever leaves the world unexpiated and unsanctified suffers the severest punishment, while the purified and reconciled will dwell among the gods after death. The overseers of these mysteries say that many carry the thyrsus but few are truly inspired; Socrates takes the inspired to be those who have dedicated their lives to wisdom, and he has left nothing undone to become one of them. Whether he succeeded he will know shortly, if God is willing. This is his defence for leaving his friends without grief and with little dread of departure, believing he goes to a better life and better friends—and he will die satisfied if this defence moves his hearers more than the one he made before the judges of Athens.
Cebes Presses the Doubt
Cebes objects that most men find Socrates’s claim incredible: they believe the soul cannot survive the body but dissolves at once like vapour rising into the air. If it were proved that the soul owes nothing of its being to its union with the body and can exist separately, Socrates’s hopes would gain great probability; but that the soul can still think, will, and reason after death is hard to comprehend and needs proof. Socrates agrees and proposes to seek arguments. After sitting silent in deep thought, he remarks that an enquiry after truth with a pure heart is the most becoming worship of the only Deity who can assist it.
Change, Opposites, and the Intermediate State
Socrates defines death as a natural change of the human condition, then asks what a natural change is. When of two opposite determinations belonging to a thing one has ceased and the other has actually begun—beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, day and night, sleep and waking—the thing has changed. If a thing begins to exist by means of a change, its opposite state must have preceded it: day after night, night after day. Cebes doubts that two directly opposite states can follow immediately upon each other. Socrates agrees, and says nature in all her changes finds an intermediate state serving as passage from one state to its opposite: night follows day through evening twilight, day follows night through morning twilight; the great becomes little by gradual decrease. Even where the intermediate state has no name, it must occur whenever one state changes naturally to its opposite. The original powers of nature are always active, always at work; were they to pause one moment, omnipotence alone could wake them again—and what omnipotence alone can do we cannot call natural. Every natural change therefore requires three things: a foregoing state, an opposite following state, and a passage between them. Cebes grants this clearly.
The Stream of Change
All changeable things, Socrates adds, cannot be one moment without changing; as time flies forward, it changes all changeable things at the same instant, showing them under a rapid succession of new forms. Cebes finds this probable; Socrates holds it incontrovertible, since every variable thing, if a reality and not a mere idea, must be capable of acting and susceptible of impressions—and nature’s powers are never at rest. That certain things seem invariable for a time does not affect the truth: flame seems always the same, yet is nothing but new streams of fire issuing without intermission from a burning body; colours appear unchanged, yet new streams of light incessantly issue from the sun. In searching for truth we must consider things according to their reality, not their impression on our senses. Cebes exclaims that this opens a new and charming view of nature, and turns to the company to apply it.
The Gradual Dissolution and Its Reversal
Socrates argues that if the body’s death were also the soul’s death, no single moment of disappearance could be identified; rather, as the body’s parts cease cooperating toward a common aim, the soul must proportionally decrease in power and internal activity. Cebes agrees this appears probable. Socrates notes their inquiry has taken a strange turn, like one of his great-grandfather Dedalus’s self-moving statues assuming a new form. They had assumed their adversaries feared sudden annihilation and set out to test that fear; instead the inquiry led to the reverse proposition—that the soul is not suddenly annihilated but gradually decreases in strength and activity. Cebes says their first opinion apparently refutes itself.
Companions in Life and Death
Socrates proposes following body and soul, said to share everything including death. While the body is healthy and its motions preserve the whole, the sense organs retain their nature and the soul possesses full power—feeling, thinking, loving, hating, conceiving, willing. When the body sickens, discord arises among its motions; the soul grows weaker, feels disordered, thinks falsely, and is often made to act against her will. When the body dies, a few feeble motions of life may remain, confining the soul’s power to dark ideas until it perishes entirely. After corruption, the parts that formed one machine take different aims; the soul’s machine is mouldered, and no organs of sensation remain to bring her feeling. Shall all her sensations, thoughts, imagination, desires, and passions disappear without trace? Cebes calls this impossible—it would be total annihilation, and no annihilation is in nature’s power.
The Labyrinth and the Escape
The soul cannot be totally lost, Socrates concludes, since a leap from existence to nothing is inconsistent with nature. She must endure and exist forever; if she exists she must act and suffer; if she acts and suffers she must have conceptions. But ideas begin from impressions on the senses—whence shall these arise without sense organs? Cebes sees a palpable contradiction: either the soul is annihilated or it has conceptions after the body’s decay, yet mankind inclines to think both impossible. Socrates asks whether the impossibility of annihilation rests on a just conception of power and natural change—admitted. The other obstacle rests on experience alone. May we extend experience beyond this life’s borders? Such reasoning, he says, resembles a man who never left Athens concluding that day and night, summer and winter, are the same everywhere; or a child in the womb thinking release into sunlight impossible. He cites Homer, who makes his hero exclaim that in the house of Orcus the soul still thinks though no body attends it. Homer’s picture of Orcus is not altogether consistent with truth, but the soul triumphs over death and corruption, rising above the dust according to other natural though superterrestrial laws to contemplate the Creator’s works.
What the Soul Can Still Desire
If the soul lives and thinks after death, she will seek happiness, and must have a will aiming at the highest welfare. Meat, drink, love, and sensual pleasures can no longer constitute her desires; she retains scarcely a faint, rueful remembrance of them. Riches cannot be wished for where no property is enjoyed. Ambition may adhere to the departed soul, but not toward power, riches, or nobility of birth—these follies are left with the body. There remains wisdom, love of virtue, knowledge, and truth, plus agreeable sensations from beauty, order, symmetry, and perfection, which belong essentially to a spirit. He who cared for his soul and studied virtue, wisdom, and true beauty may hope to approach step by step the most elevated Being—source of all wisdom, compass of all perfection, beauty itself. Socrates recalls transporting moments of contemplating heavenly beauty, when they forgot life and its necessities; nothing but the nearer presence of the divinity could produce such ravishing feelings. Every idea of spiritual excellence gives a glance of the deity’s being.
Socrates’ Confidence and the Swans
Socrates draws his conclusions: if wisdom and virtue are to be our ambition after this life, existence will be uninterrupted contemplation of the deity.
The Case for Perpetual Consciousness
Socrates turns to his friends with a sweeping claim: thinking beings are made for real immortality—not a brief flicker of enjoyment followed by endless oblivion, but perpetual consciousness and self-feeling. All finite spirits share essentially similar qualities, so their destinies must be essentially similar too, differing only by imperceptible degrees. Creation is ordered by complete harmony, he argues, and therefore every being’s fate must accord strictly with its merits and perfections. The question is not merely about the human race but about the whole world of thinking beings, and in the judgment of the supreme being it must have been settled in a general manner. The enquiry, then, should be conducted from a general point of view.
The Unfolding of Innate Powers
Every finite spirit, Socrates observes, carries innate qualities that unfold and grow more perfect through exercise. Man improves his natural capacity to think and feel with astonishing speed; each sensation streams in a crowd of perceptions no human tongue can express, and comparing, considering, concluding, choosing or rejecting multiplies perceptions to infinity. This incessant activity of the spirit’s faculties forms wit, understanding, reason, invention, the sense of beauty and goodness, magnanimity, philanthropy, affability—perfections no mortal has entirely avoided acquiring. Even where stupidity, folly, meanness, or cruelty appear, no being ever existed without some mark of understanding, nor a tyrant wholly stripped of humanity. All acquire the same qualities, differing only in perfection. The most impious man cannot act directly contrary to his destination; the original bent of his genius toward good will prevail at last. While vicious he remains imperfect and miserable, but the improvement of his natural good disposition promotes, even without his consciousness or inclination, the end and intention of his being. No one has lived in benevolent commerce with his fellows without leaving the world more perfect than he found it. The same holds for all thinking beings: while they have self-feeling they think, will, desire, abhor; their innate capacities expand toward perfection, their powers grow more active and ready, and they become more capable of discerning real happiness in contemplating real beauty and perfection.
Against Annihilation
Must all these acquired godly perfections, Socrates asks, suddenly vanish like light froth on water or an arrow shot through the air, leaving no trace? The smallest atom cannot be lost without the most miraculous annihilation; shall these excellencies disappear for ever? In the all-wise plan whatever is good is of endless use, and every perfection is of endless consequence—that is, the perfection of simple spirits, since no actual perfection can be allowed to compound beings, which are changeable and perishable.
Simple Versus Compound Beings
Beauty, order, and harmony cannot be attributed to compound things, nor could they collectively make out a whole. Compound things are not intended in the universal plan to have any will concerning themselves: they are lifeless, unconscious of existence, incapable of perfection in themselves. Their end is discovered in the living and feeling parts of creation—the lifeless substance serves the living as the instrument of feeling, giving ideas of beauty, order, symmetry, and perfection, or at least affording the matter for feelings impressed on the thinking being according to its internal activity. In the compound nothing exists by itself, nothing durable and stable, so that one could say in the second moment it is what it was in the first. Looking at his friends, Socrates notes how the sunlight reflected from their faces varies its stream, and their bodies have undergone innumerable changes in internal form and texture; all parts are altered. As the wise and happy of former times remarked, corporeal things are not, but spring up and decay; they suffer an irresistible torrent of changes by which every compound being is incessantly generated and dissolved. Homer signified this by terming Ocean the father and Thetis the mother of all things—demonstrating that all bodies in the visible world spring up and perish through continual changes, as if upon a perpetually agitated sea, never remaining one moment in the same situation. If compound substance is incapable of duration in itself, how much less capable of any perfection, which can only be attributed to it by the thinking being. Hence in inanimate nature beauty fades and blooms, perfection decays and reappears under another form; apparent irregularity and regularity, harmony and discord, good and bad, alternately succeed according as the use, advantage, convenience, pleasure, and happiness of the living world require, for whose benefit they were produced.
Two Classes of Living Creation
The living part of creation consists of two classes: one capable of feeling only, the other of feeling and thinking. Both share a durable nature and can possess and enjoy an internal self-subsisting perfection. The perceptions, desires, and natural instincts of all animals on earth accord wonderfully with their necessities and tend to their preservation, happiness, and increase, and partly to the benefit of their posterity. This harmony dwells within them, for these feelings and instincts are qualities of the simple incorporeal being conscious of them in itself and in other things. They are susceptible of true perfection, not derived from external things but having its stability and durability in itself. If lifeless things are made partly for animals’ support, necessities, and convenience, the animals are capable of enjoying these benefits—of feeling pleasure and displeasure, love and hatred, happiness or the contrary, and of becoming internally perfect or imperfect. If inanimate things are means employed by the all-wise Creator, the animals enter the chain of his designs.
The Limits of Animals
Viewed on earth, animals show no constant progress toward a higher degree of perfection. They receive without instruction, reflection, exercise, or intention—and here the argument pauses, poised to draw out what this limit implies for the destiny of the living creation.
The Sacrifice of Life for a Cause
Socrates next asks whether heroic spirits would sacrifice life for humanity, liberty, virtue, or truth. Many have done so, he grants, but from laudable motives rooted in the heart rather than the understanding; such persons belie their own principles without being conscious of it. He who hopes for a future life and makes his present existence consist in gradual advancement to perfection may tell himself he is sent here to perfect himself by furthering good—even at the expense of life, if good cannot otherwise be effected. If tyranny threatens the native country, justice is endangered, virtue oppressed, or religion and truth persecuted, one should use life for the end it was conferred and preserve to the human race the means of their happiness. The merit of advancing virtue with such resignation gives being an unspeakable worth of infinite duration. When death warrants what life cannot, then it is duty and vocation to die.
The Absurdity of Self-Preservation as Supreme Good
The worth of life, Socrates argues, appears and should be compared with other goods only when life is considered a means to happiness. Once we lose with life all existence, life ceases to be a means; its preservation then becomes the sole aim of our wishes and the greatest good, loved for itself alone. He therefore finds it impossible to believe that a man who apprehends his being is forever terminated with this life should, according to his principles, sacrifice himself for his country or the human race. Rather, whenever the native country requires an individual to lose his life, a war must ensue between the state and this citizen—a war just on both sides, since the country has a right to demand the sacrifice and the citizen, when life becomes his supreme good, has exactly an opposite right. He may, and according to his principles ought to, plot the destruction of his country to preserve his own dearer life. On such grounds every moral being has an absolute right to contrive the destruction of the whole world if it will prolong his own existence; all fellow creatures have the same right. This yields a general revolt, confusion, and a war just on all sides that even the most upright judges cannot decide—what can be more absurd?
The Tribunal of Truth and the Harmony of Rights
Socrates then appeals to the throne of Truth, where no doubts or uncertainty exist and everything is decidedly true or false. A doctrine that cannot be maintained without admitting absolute contradictions, inexplicable doubts, or undecided uncertainties must be false, at least in the kingdom of Truth, where perfect harmony reigns.
The Case for Immortality
The dialogue’s central claim is that thinking beings are made for real immortality—perpetual consciousness and self-feeling—and not for a brief spell of enjoyment followed by eternal insensibility. Socrates builds this on a chain of arguments rather than a single proof. Change in nature always runs between opposites through an intermediate state, and nothing that exists can simply leap into nothing; annihilation is not in nature’s power. The soul, being simple and unextended, cannot be dissolved the way a compound body is, and the power of thought cannot arise from the combination of parts that do not think. From there Socrates argues that the soul’s destiny must match its nature: all finite spirits share essentially similar qualities, so their destinies must be essentially similar, differing only in degree, and a being capable of wisdom and virtue cannot be extinguished like froth on water. The argument is cumulative, and Mendelssohn’s Socrates is candid about which steps rest on experience and which on reason—he compares the man who denies a future life to a man who has never left Athens concluding that day and night are the same everywhere.
Simmias, Cebes, and the Uses of Objection
The dialogue’s intellectual drama comes from the two young objectors. Simmias presses the old suspicion that the soul is a harmony or attunement of the body—a power of the composition that must weaken and fail as the instrument decays. Cebes goes further: grant that the soul survives, and it may still survive only as a sleeper or a man in a swoon, without self-knowledge or memory, which would be a poor immortality. Socrates treats both with patience rather than irritation, and the book makes their objections the engine of the argument; without them his proofs would be assertions. The exchange also carries the dialogue’s most human moment, when Socrates smooths Phaedon’s hair and warns the young men against becoming haters of reason, as some become haters of men after trusting the wrong friend. His answer to Simmias—that thought cannot be a product of parts, since a compound power could only arise from part-powers either like or unlike it, and neither alternative will do—is the most technical passage in the book, and it is placed deliberately at the centre.
The Laws, the City, and the Duty to Die
Running beneath the metaphysics is a political argument that gives the dialogue its moral weight. When Crito arrives with a plan to bribe the guards and smuggle Socrates out, Socrates answers with the speech of the Laws: the city raised him, educated him, and he has bound himself to its verdicts; to escape would be to destroy the laws that make any state possible. Mendelssohn uses this to draw a larger conclusion. If life were a man’s supreme good, then a condemned criminal would have a right to destroy his country to save himself, and every citizen would have the same right—a war of all against all that no judge could settle. Only if life is a means to something higher can the republic’s right to punish and the citizen’s obligation to suffer stand together. The same logic explains why Socrates can face death cheerfully: he believes he is going to better company and a clearer sight of the truth, and he has spent his life learning to die.
A Socrates for the Enlightenment
Mendelssohn’s book belongs to a particular moment: a German-Jewish philosopher of the eighteenth century, writing in German, adopting the most famous death scene in ancient philosophy to argue for the immortality of the soul on rational grounds alone. The Socrates who emerges is not a mystic but a man of providence and moral order, convinced that the powers of nature are the servants of the deity and that the world of spirits is governed by a harmony as strict as the world of bodies. The preface’s claim that the proofs from “the harmony of moral truths” are new is the book’s own bid for a place in the literature—an attempt to show that the hope of another life can be defended without revelation and without Plato’s fables. The dialogue ends where Plato’s does, with the poison and the death, and the reader is left with the argument Socrates made to his friends rather than with a miracle.
