Plato has roused many readers with the work of a great philosopher by the name of Socrates. Through Plato, Socrates lived on generations after his time. A topic of Socrates that many will continue to discuss is the idea of “an immortal soul”. Although there are various works and dialogues about this topic it is found to be best explained in The Phaedo. It is fair to say that the mind may wonder when one dies what exactly happens to the beloved soul, the giver of life often thought of as the very essence of life does it live on beyond the body, or does it die with it? Does the soul have knowledge of the past if it really does live on?
In Plato’s The Phaedo, Plato recounts Socrates final days before he is put to death. Socrates has been imprisoned and sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens and not following the rights of Athenian religion. Socrates death brings him and his fellow philosophers Cebes, Simmions, Phaedo, and Plato into a perplex dialogue about this notion of an afterlife and what does one have to look forward to after death. Death is defined as the separation of the body from the soul. In The Phaedo death has two notions a common one which is the basic idea that the soul dies and the physical, idea that the soul separates from the body after death.
“The soul is most like that which is divine, immortal intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, and ever self-consistent and invariable, whereas body is most like that which human, mortal is, multiform, unintelligible, dissoluble, and never self-consistent.” (Phaedo) According to Socrates, knowledge is not something one came to understand but it was actually imprinted on the soul. Knowledge to Socrates was an unchanging eternal truth, something that could not...
... middle of paper ...
...s safe to say that the mind is capable of wondering what something of beauty, perfection, or a perfect circle appears to be. The mind is also able to think about these ideas even if the soul has never encountered it. If these arguments prove anything it proves that The Theory of Recollection and The Cyclical Argument both attest that the soul existed before but the arguments do not prove that the soul will continue to exist after this life.
Works Cited
1. Cahn, M Steven. Classics of Western Philosophy. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc 2006
2. Morgan, K, 2000, Myth and Philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Plato, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Partenie, Catalin, "Plato's Myths", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . (April 11th2010)
Plato. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve. Plato Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
David, Adams Leening., ed. The World of Myths: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Harris, Stephen L., and Gloria Platzner. Classical Mythology: Images and Insights. 2nd ed. Mountain View: Mayfield, 1995
Grant, M. (1962). Myths of the Greeks and Romans (1st ed.). Cleveland: World Pub. Co.
Ingri and Edgar Parin D’alaure’s. Book of Greek Myths. New York: Bantam Dowbleday Dell Publishing Group, 1962.
5. Buxton, R. G. A. The complete world of Greek mythology. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Morford, Mark P.O., and Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. '7th ed'. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates suggested that knowledge comes from recollection, or, in Greek, anamnesis. He believes that the knowledge is already implanted in the human mind, and by recollection, men can retrieve back knowledge. There are two stages to this: first, a “stirring up” of true, innate opinions, then, a conversion of the knowledge (Gulley). Furthermore, Socrates believes that we acquired knowledge before this life. “As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned” (Plato 81c). Socrates holds the idea of reincarnation—as the soul reincarnates through many lives, it learns everything. Overall, the Doctrine of Recollection is based on two premises. The first is the immortality of the soul, along with its incarnations, and the second is the kinship of all nature (Ionescu).
Socrates was a philosopher who was true to his word and his death was ultimately felt by his closest friends and followers. In Phaedo, Socrates is met with his closest friends during his final hours as they await his death. At this point Socrates is prepared for death and seems to welcome it. Although death may seem like a scary inevitable fate that we all must face at one point; Socrates saw death as a privilege mainly because he believed that the soul was immortal. As a result, Socrates provides arguments as to why he believed the soul was immortal and even though all his arguments lacked unconvincing evidence, he does bring up good points. In this paper I will talk about Socrates’ most and least convincing arguments on immortality, and explain what Socrates’ problem was with Anaxagoras.
Therefore, through the soul, that has been born before being placed into a physical human body, the human has knowledge. As a result of the soul being immortal and knowing everything, Socrates ties that idea of immortality with the theory of recollection, which claims that our knowledge is inside of us because of the soul and it never learns anything new, only remembers, consequently, serving as an evidence that the soul is pre- existent. Socrates uses the knowledge of the soul to explain that there is no such thing as learning but instead there is discovery of the knowledge that one has and does, by himself, without receiving new information. However, most knowledge is forgotten at birth since we are born without knowing, for example, how to add, subtract,talk, etc. Nonetheless, the knowledge we have, has to be recollected with the help of a teacher. Socrates is able to prove this argument to a degree by using Meno’s slave, who had no prior knowledge of geometry before, as an example of how humans have the knowledge inside of them, through the soul, and they know everything but all they need are a sort of guidance to be able to “free” the knowledge they didn’t know they had inside them all this time. (Plato,
Plato. Translated by Martin Ostwasl, Edited and Introduced by Gregory Vlastos. 1956. Protagoras. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall
Our soul has already had to have these concepts before birth. Which brings him to believe the soul is capable of existing without the body, and so it is immortal.
Plato believed that the body and the soul were two separate entities, the body being mortal and the soul being immortal. In Plato’s phaedo, this is further explained by Socrates. He claims that by living a philosophical life, we are able to eventually free the soul from the body and its needs. If we have not yield to our bodily needs, we should not fear death, since it can than permanently detach the soul from the body. The most convincing argument for the immortality of the body is the theory of recollection, which shows that we are already born with knowledge of forms and that learning is thus recalling these ideas. If we are already born with knowledge this implies that are soul is immortal, since it would otherwise be a blank page.
The soul can be defined as a perennial enigma that one may never understand. But many people rose to the challenge of effectively explaining just what the soul is about, along with outlining its desires. Three of these people are Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. Even though all three had distinctive views, the similarities between their views are strikingly vivid. The soul indeed is an enigma to mankind and the only rational explanation of its being is yet to come and may never arrive.
Taylor, Alfred Edward. Plato: The Man and His Work. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1956.