Phaedo By Plato Socrates Arguments in Favor of The Soul's Immortality

This is not a full commentary, but a brief summary of Plato's Phaedo. Some points I have expounded on, others I have ignored, while others I have mentioned but have decided not to comment on, either for what I perceive as being too blatant, losing ambiguousness, or as I interpret to be not as an important of a issue as the others.

I can't think of a more interesting book on "what happens at death," than Plato's Phaedo. Socrates sets out to prove the immorality of the soul. While nothing is proven here, the arguments of logic are far superior to any inspired fallacy of words quoted from the biblical literalists as "scripture," or supernatural. But instead, here are logical arguments that truly relate reason and wisdom apart from preconceived ideas or security zones. These arguments are of a much higher level. - Richard Schwartz

"It is our duty to do one of two things; either to ascertain the facts, whether by seeking instructions or by personal discovery; or, if this is impossible, to select the best and most dependable theory that human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft to ride the seas of life - that is, assuming that we cannot make our journey with greater confidence and security by the surer means of a divine revelation." p. 145

The philosopher avoids suicide but welcomes death.

The philosopher is happy about death as he wishes to understand the ideas of things (the theory/world of ideas) without being hindered by the distractions of the body. Death will be the culmination of a life's work in search of wisdom. The mind/soul becomes pure to the ideas of justice, virtue and beauty, freed from the body at death. The mind is the highest while living, the soul at death.

The 3 types of men: lovers of money, lovers of prestige and lovers of wisdom; wisdom being the highest and only means of conquering the fear of death and freeing the soul from desires at death.

Wisdom acts as a purifying agent to the motives of those with self-control for the self-indulgent reasons of fears and desires.

The principle of opposites – whatever substrate acquires a new predicate does so by acquiring (more of) a given quality than it previously had and that is where the predicate has an opposite. Something wetter must have been drier before; becoming awake involves coming from a state of sleep, and becoming asleep involves departing from the waking state. So does not being dead involve coming from a state of life? And does not becoming alive involve coming form a state of death? Is it previous dead people who become living people? P. 124 (Harold Tarrant)

Beauty is the opposite to ugliness and right to wrong, waking comes from sleeping and sleeping from waking. The come from one another. The dead come from the living, so the living must come from the dead. If the soul can only be born from death or the dead state, then it must also exist after death, bearing in mind it has to be born again.

If there were not a constant correspondence in the process of generation between the two sets of opposites, going round in sort of cycle; if generation were a straight path to the opposite extreme without any return to the starting-point or any deflection, do you realize that in the end everything would have the same quality and reach the same state, and change would cease altogether? P. 127

If after death the dead remained in that form and did not come to life again, would it not be quite inevitable that in the end everything should be dead and nothing alive? If living things came from other living things and the living things died, what possible means could prevent their number from being exhausted by death? P. 128

The theory of recollection – that some learning is in fact the recollection of knowledge familiar from a previous existence in the fact that men appear to have clear concepts, such as equality, justice, virtue, beauty and goodness, untainted by the imperfections of human perception, such as what is considered to be a pair of equals.

Is it not true that equal stones and sticks, the very same ones, sometimes appear equal to one person and unequal to another person? And yet, have you ever thought that what you perceived as actually equal was erroneous, actually being unequal, or that your perception of equality was in reality or actuality inequality? No, never. Then these equal things are your perception and opinion and not the same as actual equality. And yet we are comparing it with a separate idea, the idea of equality. Things are perceived as equal, they have actively brought to the mind a separate knowledge of the idea of absolute equality, although they are distinct from it, whether similar or dissimilar. It makes no difference so long as the sight of such things suggests the other of equality to you, for it must be a cause of recollection, whether the two things are alike or not. The two things, which are separate things from the idea of equality, do not fall short of being thought of in the idea of equality to us. Therefore we must have had some previous knowledge of the idea of equality before the time when we first realized on seeing things we perceive as equal or unequal. And previous knowledge only comes from a prior existence of some form. What we perceive to be equal are separate things, which we are striving to become part of the idea of equality, to reach our perception of such. We are using previous knowledge of equality to compare with our senses, senses we utilize from our birth. We had knowledge, both before and at the moment of birth, not only what's actually equal, or greater, or smaller but of all such things.

A child without formal education will automatically compare objects to the idea of equality and fairness. What is he comparing it to but the idea of equality. The idea of equality is separate from all objects, and yet there is a recognition of what appears to be a recollection of previous knowledge.

There are two alternatives: either we are all born with knowledge of these standards, and retain it throughout our lives; or else, when we speak of people learning, they are simply recollecting what they knew before; in other words, learning is recollection. How is it we can have the right opinion without the knowledge? From a recollection what we once learned. If this is so, then our souls had a previous existence before they took this human shape – they were independent of our bodies and had intelligence.

As with Beauty, Virtue, Equality, Justice, Goodness and all such entities, if they really exist, if it is to these untaught ideas that we refer all the objects of our physical perception as copies to their patterns, as we rediscover our own former knowledge of them.

Socrates demonstrates the theory of two classes or the theory of ideas. There is that which is always changing. Everything we perceive with the senses is always changing. (Heraclitus – eternal flux: you cannot step in the same rivers twice) Yet there is that which is invisible beyond the senses, the world of ideas. It is the ideas that are constant, eternal, never changing. There is our perception of our senses of beauty, goodness and equality, which is always changing and there is the invisible eternal ideas of such that are never changing. It is this in which all things exist in two classes, the visible flux of change and the invisible idea of eternal, which the visible is compared to, defined from.

This then leads to the body as the changing visible in the world of appearances and the soul as the eternal invisible unchanging. The body makes the soul dizzy, confused, but once independent, the soul finds wisdom. While alive, the more detached the soul is from the body, the closer to wisdom it becomes. The soul is a slave to the body. True philosophy is wisdom, a movement towards the release of the soul, therefore it is practicing death, as wisdom is the soul released from the body.

Only philosophy releases the soul at death from fear and desires and does not return, therefore the non-philosopher remains trapped within his desires and at death returns back to the visible world of fear and desires. Philosophy is what releases the soul of desires and teaches it to trust only in itself. And unlike the non-philosopher that must return to the visible world since it has not transcended it's fears and desires, the philosopher's soul remains in this state of freedom at death and does not rush to find another realm of pleasures, pains and bodies.

Socrates then goes into human to animal reincarnations that Karmicly resembles the Larkian theory of inherited characteristics.

The Swan Song - When Swans feel that the time has come for them to die, they sing more loudly and sweetly than they have sung in all their lives before, for joy that they are going away into the presence of the god whose servants they are. It is quite wrong for human beings to make out that the Swans sing their last song as an expression of grief as their fear of death, and fail to reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or distressed in any other way; not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, whose songs are supposed to be a lament. In my opinion neither they nor the swans sing because they are sad. I believe that the swans, belonging as they do to Apollo, have prophetic powers and sing because they know the good things that await them in the unseen world; and they are happier on that day than they have ever been before. p. 145

Simmias constructively argues against Socrates teaching of the independence of the soul with the Pythagorean belief of the Pythagorean Echecrates which followed a soul-harmony theory or the attunement theory. This theory believes that the harmony, as in an instrument, is only produced with multiple parts in harmony with one another. Without the harmony of parts, there is not independent or separate harmony that inhabits the instrument, no dualities.

Socrates later argues that opposites can never be the opposite. A number can change and always remain a number, but an odd number can never change and always remain an odd number. The ideas of odd and even can never enter into the opposite ideas. "Not only does an opposite not admit its opposite, but if anything is accompanied by an Idea (Form) which has an opposite, and meets that opposite, then the thing which is accompanied never admits the opposite of the Idea (Form) by which it is accompanied.." p 170

Anotherwards, Socrates is arguing that the soul is such a thing which always brings the unchangeable quality of an Idea to that which it occupies (the body), and therefore it cannot be joined in with the opposite quality. It must exist or die. What is the opposite quality? Dying. What must be present in a body to make it alive? A living force. What is the opposite to such a force? Dying. Does it follow, then, that this living force, the soul, will never admit the opposite to it? Then this life force or soul can be considered the opposite to dying or as the un-dying. Now if this life force or soul does not admit death, then the soul is un-dying, it does not die, it can never admit the opposite to inside it, it cannot die.So what is un-dying and eternal cannot be destroyed and is imperishable.

Since the soul is immortal, it can not escape or find security from evil except by becoming good and wise as possibly can. For it takes noting with it to the next world except its education and training; and these, we are told, are of supreme importance in helping or harming those who have died at the very beginning of their journey to the other world.

Everyone has his or her own guardian spirit.

Socrates knew the earth was round, describing it as a sphere hanging on nothing, so a message to all of you biblical literalists please don't quote Job 22 or Isaiah 40:22, because your arguments of inspiration are both erroneous and dead.

"This is what I believe, then to the first place, if the earth is spherical and is in the middle of the heavens, it needs neither air not any other such force to keep it from falling; the uniformity of the heavens and the equilibrium of the earth itself are sufficient to support it. Any body in equilibrium, if it is set in the middle of a uniform medium, will have no tendency to sink or rise in any direction more than another, and having equal impulses will remain suspended. This is the first article of my belief." p. 176 written 360 BCE

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