Socrates, Sworder & a Bad Omen

Roger Sworder 27th Dec. 1946 - 27th Oct. 2016

A BAD OMEN

Several days after the present writer returned from a year’s wandering around India, China and South-East Asia, and only a few weeks before Roger Sworder died, he walked around to Dr Sworder's house, two streets away. Dr Sworder came to the front door, but since it had been an unusually wet winter in southern Australia the wooden door had swollen with moisture and was jammed. The two men pushed and pulled but couldn’t open it. Finally, Sworder called out from inside, “You’ll have to go around the back!” So the visitor went around to the back door. When he walked in, Dr Sworder said to him, “That’s a very bad omen, my friend. We haven’t seen each other for a year and we couldn’t open the door.”

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In the Phaedo we see Socrates in jail awaiting his execution. His friends visit him and are confounded by his composure and his refusal to take any steps to escape. The immediate problem that the dialogue proposes is, ‘Why is Socrates not afraid to die?’ Fear of death is natural in human beings, surely, but Socrates again shows himself to be strange specimen. Not only is he not afraid to die, but he welcomes it. This is because, as he explains to his comrades, he has been preparing for death throughout his entire life, and he has been doing this by way of philosophy. Indeed, he says, philosophy is nothing else but a preparation for death, and the true philosopher spends his whole life in pursuit of death, seeking death, yearning for its consummation.

The interlocutors, Cebes and Simmias and the others, are taken aback by this, but Socrates insists it is so and much of the dialogue is concerned with presenting this doctrine: philosophy is a preparation for death. In philosophy, Socrates explains, we are concerned not with the ephemeral and accidental qualities of the physical realm and of things apprehended by the senses, but rather with the eternal and unchanging paradigms – Forms – upon which the world of becoming is modeled. The things of the physical realm serve to remind the philosopher of their eternal models and the whole of philosophy is the study of these models, first through their physical copies and thn in themselves. These models reside in the great darkness of eternity beyond the gates of death. Why then should someone who has spent their life contemplating the eternal Forms fear death? Instead, they should welcome it. This is how a philosopher ought to live their life. Contemplating the eternal forms, the Real, and, in this, pursuing death, release from the realm of change and flux.

At 62B, however, Socrates adds an important proviso. Although philosophy is the study of death and the philosopher seeks death with his whole being, he is forbidden from doing anything to directly hasten it. We are, says Socrates, like guards standing watch at our posts, and we have a binding duty to stand at our watch until we are relieved of that obligation. Taking our own lives is strictly forbidden. It is an allegory that the mystics tell us, Socrates says, that “we men are put in a sort of guard post from which one must not release oneself or run away”. It is, he says, “a high doctrine with difficult implications.”

This is the paradox that is at the heart of the Socratic life. On the one hand the philosopher must pursue death, love death, want nothing more than death – death, the realm of the timeless Forms; the telos of life lies beyond the horizon - and yet on the other hand he is forbidden from doing anything to bring it about. In this paradox lies the fullness of a life well lived, the philosophical life.

Roger Sworder spent his life teaching philosophy but also – more than any other man the present writer has ever met – practicing a life of philosophical contemplation. He was reclusive. Hhe dedicated his time to thinking the best thoughts about the best things. He pondered mathematics, music, astronomy and geometry. He trained himself in Pythagorean arithmetic until he had an uncanny ability to compute numbers mentally. He read and pondered the dialogues of Plato over and over. He immersed himself in the epics of Homer, memorizing them in the original Greek. He would spend weeks, months, tackling fundamental philosophical questions. The present author recalls the weeks, months, Dr Sworder spent sitting at his piano carefully constructing and studying and contemplating the musical proportions described in the early sections of Plato’s Timaeus. He wrote little but what he did write was deeply considered and concerned essential matters.

When the present author last saw him Dr Sworder proposed that they write a book together with the working title: Plato & the Philosophy of Ecstasy. In the Phaedo, where Socrates is confronting death, we are given a strongly dualistic rendering of the Theory of Forms. The Forms are eternal, unchanging, singular: the particulars of the created world, on the other hand, are ephemeral, ever-shifting, composite, and so on. There is the eternal soul on the one hand and the temporary housing of the body on the other. Sworder's interpretation of Plato went beyond this. He would point out that students typically read the Phaedo first among Plato's works, and come to the Parmenides - Plato's most difficult work - last. And yet chronologically this is topsy-turvy. In the Phaedo Socrates is at the end of his life. In the Parmenides he is a very young man. Plato has constructed his dialogues to be like this. As we read them we journey back through time, and philosophically we travel from the dualism of the Phaedo backwards to the ontological unity announced in the Parmenides. This is a consequence of the paradox described above. 

Plato, Sworder believed, is the philosopher of the ecstatic. The culmination of Platonic philosophy is an ecstatic vision of an optimum world. Sworderean Platonism is not world-hating. The created realm is, as the Timaeus puts it, the best of possible worlds, and to fully realise this - to appreciate just how best this best is - is an ecstatic experience. He felt that Nietzche was almost exactly wrong about Plato in this respect. Nietzche casts Plato as the dour and joyless Apollonian, but is not Socrates a pre-eminently Dionysean figure?, Sworder asked. “Socrates drives people mad!” he said. He wanted them to write a book on the theme of divine madness in Plato. He and the present author sat and catalogued many of the passages they might discuss in such a work. One of them is the death scene in the Phaedo where Socrates drinks the hemlock like it is a draught of honey. 

* * * 

When Roger Sworder was in a critical condition in hospital the doctors brought him out of his coma and asked him how he wanted them to proceed. He asked to be let go. He knew that his time had come. His watch had ended and his obligation done. A greater compulsion had intervened. As Socrates puts it to his comrades in the Phaedo, a man must stand at his post "until the gods send some necessity upon him..." Roger Sworder recognized that such a necessity had come to him. He might have opted for futile surgery, chemotherapy, a few more years subsisting on machines, clinging to life as if death is a mournful oblivion. Instead, he didn’t flinch. Whenever he talked about death he would tell people, "I can't wait!" In others this sort of talk is just bravado and jest. In a philosopher it is a studied attitude. Accordingly, the moment he had the chance he was gone. This was only proper for a man who had spent his life practicing the philosophy of Plato, and his fearless leap into the darkness of eternity is his ultimate lesson for all who studied under him.

Plato tells us that a soul is free of rebirth and achieves liberation if it lives three lives in a row as a philosopher. We might doubt that this was Roger Sworder's third and final incarnation devoted to philosophy, but all who knew him would agree that it was surely not his first. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black