Bucket List Book Adventure #22 – Plato’s Phaedo and the Soul’s True Luggage

 Bucket List Book Adventure #22 – Plato’s Phaedo and the Soul’s True Luggage

By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures

A Rite of Fancy Bucket List Book Adventure

Book number 22 of the Bucket List Book Adventure is complete! Let me tell you all about Phaedo by Plato.

This dialogue recounts the final moments of Socrates, as told by his friend Phaedo. It opens with Socrates surrounded by those who loved him and ends with the great philosopher’s remarkably calm death after drinking the hemlock. The entire text becomes his “last lecture,” a conversation centered on the soul, the afterlife, and what it means to face death with clarity rather than fear.

"The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture."

Plato

That Socrates believed in an afterlife and in the existence of the soul wasn’t surprising. No culture, at any point in human history, has developed without some belief in a “beyond.” It appears to be a universal human instinct, this sense that something continues. Even the staunchest skeptics often resort to the line, “according to science, nothing truly vanishes; it only changes form,” as if the need to explain continuity is hardwired into us.

What did surprise me was Socrates’ conviction that earthly behavior mattered in the afterlife, and discovering that this, too, is a nearly universal belief. Across myths, religions, and moral systems, humanity has long held the idea that who we are and how we behave shape what comes next.

"No one may join the company of the gods who has not practiced philosophy and is not completely pure when he departs from life. No one but the lover of learning."

Plato

Plato presents Socrates as a man of deep virtue, someone who believed it mattered to the gods, even the Greek gods, who, in myth, are often indifferent to human morality. Yet when you look further back, beyond Greece, across cultures and eras, the connection between moral conduct and the fate of the soul appears again and again, as if it’s been part of our instinctual spiritual vocabulary from the start.

The real surprise, though, was Socrates’ belief in guiding spirits, what he calls his daimonion. After a bit of research, I realized that the idea of guardian or guiding spirits shows up in nearly every spiritual tradition. Angels, it seems, have always been among us, no matter what name they’re given.

"There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse."

Plato

But the lesson that stayed with me most was Socrates’ belief that the soul enters the underworld carrying nothing but its education and its upbringing. That struck a chord. I’ve always felt something similar. Maybe that’s why I read so much; I have some instinctive need to grow past where I started, to build something inside myself that I can carry forward, wherever “forward” ultimately leads.

xoxo

a.d. elliott

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller based in Tontitown, Arkansas.

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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