Mere Conversation
About Phaedo & Meno
What does it mean to seek? The question appears simple, but beneath it lies a deeper inquiry into the nature of human striving and the soul’s relation to truth. But what if the most essential search is not outward but inward? What if what we seek has never been truly lost, only forgotten? In Plato’s dialogues Phaedo and Meno, philosophy emerges not as the acquisition of new truths but as the recovery of ancient knowledge. The soul’s journey is not toward something foreign, but toward what it has always been. To seek, in Plato’s vision, is to remember.
In Phaedo, Socrates faces his own death with composure, and his students ask why he does not fear what is coming. His answer redefines the entire philosophical enterprise:
I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death. Now if this is true, it would be strange indeed if they were eager for this all their lives and then resent it when what they have wanted and practiced for a long time comes upon them.1
Philosophy, according to Socrates, is preparation for death. To practice for dying is to loosen the soul’s attachment to the body, to sensory pleasure, to the shifting contingencies of material existence. It is to recognize that what we truly are is not the flesh that perishes but something that endures. Philosophy thus becomes a discipline of detachment—not from life itself, but from the illusion that life is confined to the body. This orientation inverts our ordinary understanding of what it means to strive. Most human effort is directed toward securing the body’s survival and comfort, toward achieving status in the eyes of others, toward accumulating what can be measured and displayed. But Plato insists that this is a form of spiritual misdirection. The philosopher does not seek what the world values because the world’s values are themselves unstable and bound to what decays. True seeking requires turning away from surfaces toward essence, from the temporal toward the eternal.
