JILL GORDON“Very true,” he replied.
“And it is either like them or unlike them?”
“Certainly.”
“It makes no difference,” said he, “Whenever the sight of one thing
brings you a perception of another, whether they be like or unlike, that
must necessarily be recollection.” (74a– d)What makes this passage remarkable is its claim that we can come
to know the realities from the objects of human experience in the pro-
cess called recollection. By using our senses—in this case, sight—we can
come to know something of things-in-themselves. Socrates even claims
that “it is impossible to gain this knowledge [of reality], except by sight or
touch or some other of the senses” (75a)! By perceiving, we are reminded
of, and we recover, the realities our souls once knew. The objects of our
experience and the things-in-themselves are both like and unlike, so we
glimpse the realities insofar as they are similar to the images before us,
and at the same time we recognize that the images before us are not the
realities themselves, are unlike them in fundamental ways.
Recollection thus provides the link between all three dichotomies:
senses and reason are linked by recollection, since we rely on our senses
in order to grasp what we might later reason about, namely, the reali-
ties; objects of experience and things-in-themselves are linked by rec-
ollection, since we recall the things-in-themselves through the objects
of our experience; and body and soul are linked through recollection,
since the senses and the intelligence necessarily work together in that
activity. This means, incidentally, that recollection is therefore what al-
lows embodied souls to be integrated beings. Most important, what be-
comes clear when we take these aspects of recollection together is that
recollection is what makes philosophy possible. We can have access, and
we can only have access, to the things-in-themselves through our dim
images of them in this realm because of the links recollection makes
possible.
The Phaedo, then, portrays philosophical investigation taking place
between the realms of sense and intellect, and so the exclusivity of the
two realms in the traditional “Platonic” metaphysical dualism needs to
be reexamined. Socrates’ explicit commitment to the study of the ob-
jects of human experience, and to the sensible faculties as a means for
investigating the realities, that is, as a means of philosophical investiga-
tion in the genuine learning process of recollection, remains incongru-
ous with the traditional view. The two realms are necessarily linked,
and philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality must necessarily