[Buddha-l] A tribute to Ven. Sheng-yen

[Dan Lusthaus]

No Buddhist (or, for that matter, anyone who can think logically) should
find the Phaedo reasonable, since it argues, poorly, for the immortality (=
permanence, eternality) of the soul, a proposition that even the Indian
philosophers who embraced that position could mount a successful argument
for.

Plato is unsurpassed in two things:

1) Laying out, with insight and depth, the range of topics and concerns
every subsequent philosopher must take up, in whole or in part.

2) Rich, memorable analogies and metaphors (the cave, divided line, Meno's
slave boy, etc.), that are so multidimensional that they still stimulate
creative, critical thinking.

What Plato was absolutely miserable at was mounting a logical argument (most
of which are forgotten or overlooked today by all except the most intrepid
Plato scholars -- for good reason).

The Phaedo, unfortunately, is primarily a dialogue of this third type, and
thus primarily of interest simply because he *tried* to mount an argument
for the soul's immortality, not because he succeeded. There are so many
unquestioned assumptions and category errors in his four main arguments that
one needn't be Derrida to deconstruct them with relative ease. He
presupposes a steady-state universe in which what was the case will always
be the case, at least at the level of form, and conflates the "idea of a
soul" (its eidos) with actual, particular souls, etc. Because the eidos
(idea, form) of "triceratops" may be eternal in a Platonic scheme, does not
entail that dinosaurs cannot go extinct (and with them, their eidos until
reimagines on the basis of newly found bones and reconstructions).
Conflating "soul" (already a very imaginary idea) with "life" (jivitendriya)
would be a tempting mistake for some Indian philosophers (e.g., Jaina
jivas), but they mostly desist. We are also much more aware of the vast
lifeless expanses of the universe -- and the tenuousness and coincidentality
of the emergence of life on this planet -- than Plato could have been. The
sensibilities he presumes are today counterintuitive.

The shabbiness of Plato's "logic" (not just in this dialogue, but wherever
it appears in the others) is a powerful testament to Aristotle's immense
achievement in developing sound logical principles and rules (the prior and
posterior analytics; differentiating logic proper from dialectic, etc.).

Hope the class went well.

Dan

----- Original Message ----- 
> Phaedo calls. I have to go teach that bewildering text in about an hour,
> and I am completely baffled by it.