res also spawn confusion. The desires of the body lead one towards inaccurate judgements about the relationships between and true natures of experiences. Unfortunately, the soul begins to accept what the body immediately reports as the source of pleasures and pains as the true cause. The soul also begins to mimic the body's pattern of explanation. This type of training will only continue to fix the soul within the body and cover its eyes. Fortunately, the human soul can recognize the enslaving nature of desire. Casting an observant eye towards this nature begins to break the soul away from the falsified pattern of inquiry that it has developed. Before, when the distracting methods of the body were used to search for truth, the soul was continually being led away from its goal by its own method, a self-defeating process resembling Charlie Chaplin trying to retrieve his hat while always kicking it just out of reach. Now the repetitive cycle can be escaped. The individual is no longer doomed to repeat the same mistakes continually by living according to the same nature. But, this escape is possible only on the basis of the figurative death mentioned above, bringing us again to the question of integrating the themes of the literal and figurative deaths that seem implicit in the Phaedo. Some commentators on this text identify only the physical or literal death as the agent forseparating the soul and the body. They argue that only this separation completely disassociate the two. Jowett, for example, states that the philosopher wants to entirely abolish the body and completely discard the senses. Also relinquished will be the states of mind which result from associating with the body. When the body disappears, so too will the pains and pleasures that accompany it . Support for this reading can be seen in his translation of Phaedo. "And here it is the characteristic of the philosopher to despise the b...
