Innate Knowledge and Death

Tapping into innate knowledge is a mystery that has baffled generations of learned men and women denying them the ability to state for certain and true that knowledge is liken unto a shared casserole at a family or company picnic; that everyone can reach within and draw forth the realization of corporeal understanding from the resources of disembodied knowledge and make the same their own. According to the Advanced English Dictionary, knowledge is “the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning”, while the psyche is “that which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason”, finally episteme is “the body of ideas that determine the knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time” all of which indicate the possibility of pre-knowledge before the birth of a child. Where does this ‘knowledge’ come from? Where does the soul come from?

If one was to take into consideration the Christian Holy Bible, Genesis 2: 7 which states: “And the lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Socrates’ argument of innate knowledge stands along with the beliefs of Christianity, because Adam formed of the dust of the earth and Eve from his rib were given knowledge of everything. Socrates states: “Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which, as we see, it once possessed” (Meno 81c).

Socrates continues to prove to Meno with the example of the boy and the area of a square. “Observe Meno, the stage h...

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...hat as the sun set in the west that his soul would return to the presence of god and he would be totally healed and purified from all of earth’s hindrances and toils. What greater epithet could friends bestow upon a departed soul, “Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man” (Phaedo 118a).

The body decays and returns to the dust from which it was created and the soul returns to that which loaned the essence of life to the body, Socrates knew as the swan sang more beautifully as death approached, that death was not to be feared but embraced.

Works Cited

Hamilton, Edith & Cairns, Huntington. Plato: The Collected Dialogues including the letters. 20th Edition. Princeton: Bollingen Foundation. 2009. Print.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepius