The works of Socrates

Socrates’ works have only been made available to us through the contradicting writings of other philosophers of the period. Plato, one of his students, reflected his thoughts. The conversation of Phaedo is unique in that it recounts Socrates’ final moments, from the time of his conviction to when he consumes poison to when his body loses consciousness (Plato 2012, pp. 34-56). Importantly, it depicts the traits of an ideal man, who is smart and right in the highest degree due to his endurance to death. Socrates’ four arguments for the immortality of the soul are presented in Phaedo. The dialogue is a narration by Phaedo to his friend, Echecrates of Phlius about the events and conversation they experienced with Socrates in prison on the day he was condemned to death by suicide. Due to the circumstance at the time, the dialogue between Socrates and his friends naturally turns to question regarding death, the soul and the afterlife. In this regard, this paper will explore the argument presented by Socrates on the immortality of the soul and provide different perspectives as to whether they are defensible or not.

Immortality of the soul

In the conversation with his friend in the run-up to his death, Socrates equates death to freedom of the soul from the passions of the body. He claims that not even a philosopher can be wise on earth unless they die and their bodies are disintegrated from the soul. The true essence of a philosopher’s life is to prepare for death by resisting temptations of the body. Given that a philosopher lives his life trying to find meaning to it, other than the bodily pleasures and the societal constructed goals of wealth accumulation, he must not be scared of death or so, as argued by Socrates (Plato 2012, pp. 45-54). In the dialogue, he engages with his friends outside the courtroom before he is tried for misleading the youth and impiety. Socrates informs his friends that it is okay to live an examined life, that the only difference that human have from other animals is the ability to reason and this gift should be used accordingly to question every deed and actions of the society. Reigning over passions and desires, and philosophising on every aspect of life is what makes a philosopher. Death is a reflection of this, except that when a person is dead, his/her soul is separated from the body and so the individual does not have to be distracted by the body pleasures and earthly desires. According to Socrates, the essence of life is to pursue higher pleasures such as virtue, justice and knowledge of the environment. These great pleasures are hindered by the body’s desire to drink and feed, have sex and the desire to achieve honour, something that has no relation to one’s characters. According to Socrates, virtue is achieved by the soul in self-reflection (Plato 2012, p. 24). Going against the will of one’s body and endeavour for independence in a way that upholds the values of the community and one’s quest for wisdom is what makes a philosopher king - a personality above all else. Thus, this is an exercise that involves separating the body from the soul, which a philosopher undertakes as his eternity. Contrary to the idea that when the body dies, so does the soul, Socrates believed that death presents an opportunity for the soul to join with other souls in a place where wisdom thrives. The dualistic notion of Socrates of how a non-material soul contends with a material body raises philosophical questions worth inquiry. Notably, Socrates presents four key arguments to dispense his friend’s doubt on the immortality of the soul.

The cyclical argument

The argument is of the opposites, where Socrates wonders whether the existence of realities come from their opposites. Sleeping is the contrary of sleeping. Therefore, the reverse holds. Fastness and slowness are opposites as much as big and small are. He advances this argument to state that life is the contrary of death. Thus, life is generated from death just as death is generated from life. The philosophical point here is whether it is a prerequisite that things that have their contrast were created from those contradictions. He quotes; “If generation were in a straight line only, and there were no compensations or circle in nature, no turn or return of elements into their opposites, then you know that all things would, at last, have the same form and pass into the same state, and there would be no more generation of them. If all things which partook of life were to die, and after they were dead remained in the form of death, and did not come to life again, all would at last die, and nothing would be alive”(Plato 2012, p. 98)

In essence, he thinks of death as inconsequential since he believed that by the fact that death exists, he would live in another realm without his body. He establishes the immortality of the soul from his analogy of the contrasts. In conferring sleeping as a contrast of being awake, he argues that sleep comes before awake and therefore, does awake come before sleep. In this argument, everything with the opposite is a product of their opposites. If an item is fast, there is a sense in which it must have been slow, and a slow object can be fast when it increases its velocity. Thus, the soul is considered immortal because it mirrors death.

However, this argument poses a problem when actions of an object are separated from the object itself. A precise adjective look at these thoughts of Socrates, reveals that the adjectives only describe the object and in that respect, can have some opposites (Wagner 2001, p. 281). The fact that living is an action describes the state of an object, in this case, a person, for which death may be associated. The necessary existence of contracts is only possible when we use descriptive words. A person walking can be described as walking slowly or faster. Ascribing a different term to most adjectives gives one a possibility of deeming a certain adjective to be occurring before another. Attributes are used to qualify nouns, for example, G is slow, or F is fast. By quantifying F as Fast, it means that a contrasting term can be ascribed to it when that velocity changes.

On the contrary, nouns cannot exist as contrasts since some of them such as death and life only describe the object, not their state. Therefore, it is not logically sound, and it wrecks the philosophical point to ascribe a contrast to it (Wagner 2001, p. 283). Another problem that emerges from Socrates argument of contrast that makes it difficult to defend is that there is no evidence as to the existence of life after death, other than mere conjecture. The notion only presents evidence as to the fact that there was life before life in the physical realm. In essence, therefore, death is dependent on life, and the same cannot be said to life. Notably, this argument of contrast is further made difficult by the fact that when a person dies, there is no way they can relay information about life after death. So, while death is the opposite of life, no evidence can be ascribed to the existence of life after death. While it could be agreed upon that after death there are some of the body parts that will continue to live, it is not possible to conclude that the soul would be one of them. Conversely, this argument seems to allude that though the reality is a cyclical process, the sequence seems to end by death because the body is destroyed completely. So, when death occurs, the cyclic argument seems to be linear in form.

The argument of recollection

In this argument, Socrates argues that some abstract knowledge is not taught in the scientific world. Humans are endowed with the understanding of conceptual ideas such as beauty, justice, and equality because people have been acquainted with these elements in the theoretical world before encountering the physical world (Topping 2007, p. 67). The critical points in the metaphysical view are that in addition to the ordinary and familiar empirical physical world, there exists a kind of the second realm that consists of transcendental ideas, the sort of aspects considered or thought of as an abstract object. The reason Socrates posits this thing is because humans can think of them and yet realise that the physical world - although things may contribute in them to dissimilar extents, they do not encounter intangible objects or entities in the physical world. Thus, it is easy to label things as beautiful, but people can never encounter beauty itself in the actual world.

Usually, there is the notion of an abstract object such as justice, as it is possible to determine or speak of deeds considered to be unjust without experiencing them. In this regard, it is easy to bump into individuals or societies that are just, but never encounter justice itself. A good example would be for a child who when acting defiantly, seems to be conscious of it, even before being taught of what is right and wrong. As per Socrates, this kind of realisation is impossible if human souls had not existed in another realm. The argument can be given more weight from the analogy of relativity of these abstract things. There is no one-suit-fits-all scale for equality, justice and beauty. A collection of sticks may appear equal to one’s eye and unequal to the other, suggesting that when the questions of this transcendental knowledge are presented straightforwardly and adequately, everyone will provide a correct answer to them, an indication that they had familiarised it in a different realm.

According to Socrates, therefore, learning is not an undertaking of human beings, rather the things are known from “learning” are a mere recollection of elements known before birth and those that were lost during birth. While there is no evidence as to whether or not the destruction of the body could lead to the destruction of the soul, Socrates argues that, if the physical world cannot grasp the abstract, then there has to be an abstract soul to make deductive of them, and this abstract soul cannot be destructed physically. If the conceptual ideas are eternal, then it also follows that the soul that must grasp them is infinite and nonphysical; hence, immortal. The death of a person with the intellectual conception of the forms -justice, beauty, piety - does not lead to the death of the forms, meaning that they remain eternal. The fact that knowledge of the abstract is recollected makes the argument for failing in providing an account of what is responsible for the obliteration of that knowledge. Conversely, it shows that the soul must pre-exist the body and therefore, it begs the question whether it is the body that requires the soul to exist or the soul that requires the body to exist. But again, destruction of the soul is very impossible, given that the soul has no parts in the physical form. The fact that the soul is not composite makes it difficult to destroy even with death itself. According to Socrates, death is not destructive, but rather a transformation in which the soul is disentangled from the bodily pleasures.

Accordingly, this argument is supported by the notion of affinity, which states that the soul bears an affinity to the invisible, the immortal, and the indissoluble, while the body exhibits a resemblance to the visible, the mortal and the dissoluble (Plato 2012, p. 87). The idea that the abstract things such as beauty, truth and justice are embodied in the soul justifies their static nature. On the other hand, the body is subject to change, and that is why it loses all that it finds in the physical world. The Soul, according to Socrates, is what controls the body because it bears the affinity to the abstract and immortal forms. Mainly, this argument poses a problematic scenario for the soul, being part of the body, is presented as static. Socrates tackles the objections to these in the debate of the form of life. Since the soul is the bringer of life, it cannot be dead. Does this not mean that death of the body occurs because the soul is dead?

Conclusion

The arguments presented by Socrates to defend the immortality of the soul are fundamentally right and make logical sense. However, they do not offer empirical evidence as to the existence of the soul, given that it is just an abstract thing. In the contemporary world build on the firm belief of scientific knowledge, these arguments. However sound, cannot stand scientific proof. Apparently, it is true that as a human being, we should not be thrilled by bodily pleasures and material well-being as those would be an emulation of nature, for which we have the power of reason to resist. The immortality of the soul as presented by Socrates is incomplete and because there is no substantial information yet from the afterlife. Thus, it is complicated to support any of these arguments.

References

Plato, J.M., ed ; 2012. Phaedo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Topping, R., 2007. Two Concepts of the Soul in Plato’s Phaedo: A Beginner’s Guide to the Phaedo and Some Related Platonic Texts on the Immortality of the Soul. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.

Wagner, E., 2001. Essays on Plato’s Psychology. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.