Plato's View of Immortality - Essay Example

Plato’s View Of Immortality Death is defined as "the separation of the soul from the body"; but is not the end of the soul. Plato believes in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from one living thing to another, and in reincarnation, the rebirth of the soul in new bodies. The Phaedrus offers proof of the soul's immortality, proving the existence of gods from self-generating motion. It is the nature of the soul to initiate its own changes, to be self-moving, rather than merely moved. On this view, something that is self-moving "can neither be destroyed nor come into being." Plato believes that only a soul of a philosophical lover of knowledge and virtue is worthy of traveling beyond the process of rebirth to ultimate fulfillment. Plato believed in the immortality of the soul and the overall. Plato believed that the body played no real role in who we are as people; the only thing that shows who we are is our soul. Plato even suggests that death could be like an eternal sleep, where none of the senses are active. However, Plato says that it would be better to travel to a place where one could converse with all the great thinkers of the past. Plato argues that our soul is immortal because we are born with some form of intelligence within us. He argues that since things are supposedly born from opposites, life can only be birthed from death.[Plato, Republic] Plato denies that fever, or any other disease, or the knife put to the throat, or even the cutting up of the whole body into the minutest pieces, can destroy the soul, until she herself is proved to become more unholy or unrighteous in consequence of these things being done to the body; but that the soul, or anything else if not destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is not to be affirmed by any man.[Plato, Republic] Soul cannot be destroyed by an evil whether inherent or external, must exist forever, and if exists forever is immortal. Plato, in Republic asserts that the immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are many other proofs; but to see it as what it really is, not as we now behold it, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate it with the eye of reason, in its original purity; and then beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all the things which we have described will be manifested more clearly. Thus far, we have spoken the truth concerning as it appears at present, but we must remember also that we have seen it only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of sea-weed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is to his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. Let us see whom it affects, and what society and converse it seeks in virtue of its near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different this would become if, wholly following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which it is now, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around because it feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things in this life as they are termed: then you would see this as it is, and know whether she have one shape only or many, or what her nature is. Of her affections and of the forms which she takes in this present life I think that we have now said enough. Plato supposes that the soul pre-exists this life, the next issue for him is the question whether it manages to survive this death. The alternative Plato considers is that the soul is scattered. Things that are composite are likely to break up, things that are simple are not. We have a body which belongs to the visible type of things, and we have a soul that is invisible. The soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble and never consistently the same, so we may suppose that the body will pretty quickly fall apart and decay while the soul will be altogether indissoluble, or nearly so. The nearly so idea is spelled out in terms of those souls polluted by too great a concern for bodily pleasures who will spend time as ghosts and return to earth in suitably degraded forms, whereas pure philosophers are allowed to get off the wheel of reincarnation and spend their time with the gods.[Tad Brennan, Reading Plato] Plato has at least formulated an account of what we really are that is tempting for anyone reflecting on the nature of experience. To be a conscious subject of experience does not seem to be a composite state, even though the contents of experience are diverse; it does not seem to admit of qualitative change from one time to another, despite the changes in the content of experience or the body's aging. It appears to be the origin for most action and thus in charge of the body. Bostock notes that in the Republic the conflicts mentioned here are characterised not as soul versus body but parts of the soul in conflict with each other, so they could be accommodated by a version of a harmony view. However, the mind cannot be construed as ontologically dependent upon the body in any way. We may still not have reached a consensus on how to present such a view, but it is not for want of trying and of presenting different conceptions that do just that. Plato's response to the possibility that souls might just last longer than bodies, but not for ever, is to propose a more comprehensive account of coming into being and passing away. He presented Socrates as narrating part of his biography: that he was once interested in the natural world and sought to understand its workings; that he was attracted by a view that Mind is the ultimate cause, but in practice that theory never got beyond purely physical causes. It would explain his sitting in prison by reference to his bones and sinews, rather than by the fact that he thought it best to obey the law. So, despairing of discovering the true theory that appeals to Mind and things being for the best, and rejecting as fatuous error the fixation on that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause, he adopted a second best approach that appeals once again to the Forms. So a thing is beautiful because it shares in the Form of beauty, and we avoid attempted explanations that appeal to its colour or shape or whatever. [Tim Duvall, Immortality and After life] Soul here is in effect what makes a body alive. This is not obviously the same notion as we have been dealing with before. It carries with it in Plato's thought the idea that motion is to be explained by soul — all motions, including unthinking bodily functions, as well as the motions of the planets. The principle gives us that soul, understood as above, is never not-alive, when it exists. Plato notes that snow entails cold so can never be warm, but it can just cease to exist. The crucial move for soul is not the principle but the slide, from the truth that the soul is always living, to the wild surmise, that for all times the soul is living. Looking at this as an early account of explanation, it incorporates what was for a long time a very influential principle. This might seem to conflict with the principle Plato enunciated earlier about opposites. He raises the issue himself and answers it by saying that things acquire properties from having their opposite but the properties themselves never admit of opposites. Plato returns to the issue of immortality elsewhere. At the very end of the Republic he has an argument based on the supposition that what harms the body eventually destroys it but what harms the soul does not destroy it. Each kind of thing is supposed to have its characteristic harm and it is only its particular harm that destroys it. But the argument here confuses what we prize about something with what is necessary to keep it in being. We may value justice and disparage cowardice but it might all the same be a matter of cell chemistry that keeps a body alive and able to manifest these virtues or vices. Plato's views in the Republic seem to be intended to provoke thought rather than to set forth consistent views. Plato's Symposium offers this alternative view. Plato's Socrates recounts Diotima's speech on true love, which puts forth the notion of being pregnant in body and in soul. This latter pregnancy gives birth to wisdom as its offspring, which is immortal. He argues that active intellect is eternal and immortal; it produces ideas and in so doing reproduces itself in much the same way that the body produces physical offspring and in so doing reproduces itself. In this way, modern thinkers may be over-reading Plato's view on immortality. The death of the individual involves the cessation of function for that individual, but the life of that person does not end if he or she has produced offspring, if that person has been pregnant in body or soul. Perhaps our current world provides a terrible context for those of us currently living our mortal lives. Living in a world that valorizes individual choice in a social and economic environment that lauds competition between individuals for scarce resources and rewards because such competition makes our production more efficient, we may be in perhaps the worst milieu for the encouragement of self-transcendence. Religion actually plays a part in altering the mortal context, so that we might become capable of the self-transcendence that the major religions support. The implications of this are staggering, though not especially surprising given that many have argued that religion's cousin, philosophy, ought to play just such a role. Bibliography 1. Immortality and the afterlife, Tim Duvall, The History of Ideas, Vol: 3, Net Industries. 2. Plato, Phaedo, Steve Thomas, The University of Adelaide Library, South Australia, 2003 3. Plato, Protagoras, Steve Thomas, The University of Adelaide Library, South Australia, 2003 4. Plato, Symposium, Symposium, The University of Adelaide Library, South Australia, 2006 5. Plato, The Republic, Book X: The Recompense of Life, (Socrates. Glaucon), Steve Thomas, The University of Adelaide Library, South Australia, 1997 6. Reading Plato: Phaedo, in CP: 300-330, Plato Immortality of Soul, Tad Brennan, Ed. Brandon, 2001. Read More