Plato 1

Will we survive?

The human being as essentially a 'soul'

Plato has a number of arguments purporting to show that human beings are immortal.

They all assume that the human being is essentially a 'soul': it is the 'soul' that is said to go on existing even though the body has fallen to the worms.

How did Plato think of the soul? A person was supposed to be some sort of duality - a body and a soul.

Reasons for thinking a human being has a 'soul'

What was it that led people to think of the human being in this way? For Plato at any rate it seems to have been the phenomenon of movement.

Some things around us seem capable of initiating movement: plants grow, animals are independent movers. Other things do not move except when pushed or pulled - pebbles. The ancients saw this as a distinction of fundamental importance - between things that were capable of initiating change and things that were not. This was the distinction between things which possessed and things which lacked life.

Both sorts of thing manifestly were or had 'bodies'. A pebble was a body, (read, taking a probably indefensible short-cut, 'physical thing') a tree had a body (read: was a physical thing) , and so did a badger. So it couldn't be body which had the capacity to initiate movement. Ergo, there must be something besides body in those things that had this capacity. So they said that self-movers - living things - had souls, and that it was the soul which had the ability to start movement off.

Plato Courtesy Princeton Plato project

Plato:

' ... the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul.'

Plato, Phaedrus, 245

Keeping movement going

There was in Ancient thought another question besides what was it that was capable of starting movement off? Another question was: What is it that keeps movement going once started. - For it was assumed prior to Galileo and Kepler that to continue in movement a thing needed to be continuously pushed or pulled. You had to explain what kept the arrow going once it had left the bow.

But both starting and maintaining movement was thought to be down to the soul. The soul was what may be called the 'principle' of life.

Could anything more be said about the soul besides that it's being the 'life principle'?

The soul as our 'intellect'

The argument from 'recollection' purports to show that the soul is also the vehicle of thought, or what is perhaps best called the 'intellect'. We will encounter it later. But it tries to show that we now know things we couldn't possibly know unless we existed before we were born. So the soul is part of the human being which has that kind of knowledge. The soul is our cognitive part - our 'intellect'.

What reasons do we have for thinking that the body can't do cognition?

The 3-part soul

'Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground—there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings!'

Plato, Pheadrus, 246

Elsewhere Plato speaks of 'reason', 'spirited element', and 'appetite' as the three elements of the soul.

Do you think we have 'reasoning faculty'? An emotional faculty? Do you think we have desires? How many? Where should we look for an answer to questions like this?

Arguments for immortality

1. Living things (soul= principle of life) cannot be lifeless.

2. The soul is simple, not composite, and uncompounded things cannot cease to exit. We know that the soul is simple because we know it is incorruptible.

3. You need there to be souls to maintain movement. (So what rules out the souls existing on a rota basis?)

4. We possess knowledge which we could only have acquired in a former life. The body disintegrates on death. Therefore something distinct from the body must have been the vehicle for carrying knowledge across the death.

Any other arguments for immortality?

Transmigration of souls

Web Do we live more than once?

John Adams' whose composition On the Transmigration of Souls marked the 9/11. Pic courtesy Playbill Arts

Plato believed that after the death of one body a soul generally moved into another. And the sort of body it moved into depended on the sort of life it had lived until its most recent partner decomposed. The souls of gluttons and drunkards get reincarnated as asses. The souls of people who abuse their power might come back as birds of prey or beasts of a low kind. The souls of decent persons might come back as pleasant social creatures such as ants or bees. Only one sort of person would have souls that would not come back but live on permanently liberated form body in a state of perpetual happiness. These were the philosophers.

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Arguments for transmigration of souls?

Credits

Badger courtesy Natural Selection