1. Two Worlds

Prior to Socrates and Plato (in the Presocratic tradition), there were two conceptions of reality: one essentially static (represented by Parmenides) and the other essentially dynamic (represented by Heraclitus). According to the first, reality is one and unchanging. According to the second, reality is changing.

Plato's conception of reality distinguishes between the changing world of appearances (the sphere of the spatio-temporal world) and the world of unchanging and eternal reality. The world of appearances is the VISIBLE WORLD of particular things, and it is characterized by mutability (i.e., change). The real world is suprasensible (beyond our senses) and the INTELLIGIBLE world. Plato combines the Heraclitean doctrine of flux and the Parmenidean principle of reality as unchanging to show that there is a distinction between two realms: an intelligible one grasped by the mind (by intuition and reflection) and a sensory one grasped through the senses. The former is unchanging and immaterial; the latter mutable and material.

According to Plato, the real world is constituted by abstract entities called Forms.

First, in the VISIBLE WORLD we find a plurality of substances under the same name (e.g., table, chair, tree, guitar). Each of these substances has a corresponding "nature" or "quality" which is represented in particular instances. Every substance has an essence (its essential properties). According to Plato, what we grasp under a concept of a thing (i.e., its essence) is not merely a subjective concept (an idea in our heads), but an objective essence, something which has existence independent of any particular instance. Such an entity is a Form. And there would appear to be as many Forms as there are natural objects that involve an instantiation of a universal concept. Furthermore, in the VISIBLE WORLD, we make judgements that involve moral and aesthetic universals (so-called abstract ideas), x is good, x is just, x is beautiful. Like natural objects (who essence exists independently of any instantiation in the physical world), so-called properties (like goodness, justice, and beauty) also exist independently of their instantiations in substances.

So,

actual horse => real horse

"x is just" = > real justice

Unlike the instantiation of an essence in a particular substance, a FORM is perfect

IMMATERIAL

ETERNAL (TIMELESS)

IMMUTABLE (UNCHANGING)

INDEPENDENT OF SENSIBLE PARTICULARS

FORMS belong to the INTELLIGIBLE REALM of BEING.

They are imperfectly represented in the VISIBLE WORLD of BECOMING.

The FORMS appear to be the ground of their corresponding particular or singular. They seem to be exemplars that are approximated by sensible particulars:

* F-ness is perfectly F

* x is F to degree n

A sensible particular is F because of its relation to F-ness

* x participates in F-ness

* x exemplifies F-ness

* x has F-ness

Material objects imitate or participate in the Forms.

A Form: a physical object :: an object : its shadow.

So

an actual chair

is to a shadow (drawing) of chair

what

Real chair is to actual chair.

We can map out Plato's epistemology in the light of his metaphysics.

The object of Knowledge is Form:

Knowledge (episteme)----------------------> Forms (Being)

*Intellection (noesis)

*Hypothetical Reasoning (dianoia)

The object of Opinion is everything within the visible world:

Opinion (doxa)--------------------------> Sensible Things (Becoming)

*Belief (pistis)

*Illusion (eikaisia)

Moreover, TRUE BELIEF is distinct from KNOWLEDGE.

The process of philosophical analysis is aimed at episteme (and thus the Forms). See one-page handout on Plato’s understanding of episteme.

Thesis: The philosopher (lover of wisdom) should be and is willing and ready to die.

1. The Question of Suicide: It is not right to kill oneself. (61e-62c)

It is highly unlikely that suicide is right because the body is like a prison house in which the gods, our guardians have placed us, and we should not run away from it, as that would be running away from our service to the gods, unless the gods have indicated some reason to do so (like the evidence which Socrates has in his possession).

2. It appears that (1) is not consistent with the thesis. (62d-63b)

For it appears that the wise man will know that he will not be able to better care for himself when he is free from his deity-guardians than when he is under their protection and care. So it appears that the wise would resent dying; the foolish would welcome it. (Cebes)

But to the contrary...

3. Socratic Response: In death one goes to the gods and good men

Socrates believes that he is going to a place of good and wise masters, the gods and other good men. Such a person cannot resent death, for he believes that he is not leaving good masters, but going to them. He is not being freed from the gods, but being freed from something else to the gods and other good men. (63b-d)

Moreover, a philosopher who practices philosophy in the "proper manner" is one who spends his life practicing for dying and death. Therefore, if they have spent their lives aiming toward such a goal, it would be inconsistent for them to resent it when the time finally arrives. (63e-64b)

Thesis: The Philosopher's life is spent practicing dying.

1. What is death? Clarifying the central concept. (64c)

Death is the separation of the soul from the body.

a. Negative Statement: The philosopher is not interested in things of physical pleasure (food, drink, sex, bodily adornments). In fact, he despises them. Such a man lives close to death all his life, because all such things are things of the body. (64c-65a)

b. Positive statement: The philosopher aims at knowledge. But knowledge is had by reasoning, but soul reasons and the body is an obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge. The soul will reason best when none of the senses trouble it. Then reality becomes clear to the soul. (65a-65d)

2. Knowledge as a Cognition of Essences (65d-66d)

b. We come closest to knowledge when we grasp what a thing is (the essence of a thing)

c. The essence of a thing is not grasped not by the senses, but by the intellect or reason. The body and sense are obstacles to grasping the essence of a thing.

3. Pure Knowledge is Post-Mortem (66d-67b)

Therefore

Therefore,

A remaining Question:

IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?

In the Phaedo, metaphysical and epistemological separation is developed in the context of the question of death and the philosopher's attitude toward death and is explicitly expressed in the contrast between body and soul. . . . .

The BODY holds us to OPINIONS of the VISIBLE WORLD.

The SOUL reaches toward and is alone capable of KNOWLEDGE of the FORMS.

The philosopher is a soul-man!

If pure knowledge is to be obtained, then the soul must ultimately be freed from the body, so that it can have direct contact with the forms.

The word "soul" (Gr., psyche) originally meant "life force" or "animating principle" and thus any living thing (i.e., anything exhibiting motion) could be said to have (a) soul. An "immortal" soul on this view is not the same as personal immortality (the continued existence of a complete personality into another life). Plato's account in the Phaedo and elsewhere is of personal immortality, as the soul is thought of here as roughly identical with the self or person, but it is an immaterial substance.

Question: Will the soul enjoy existence independent of the body?

Is the soul intrinsically related to the body? (such that it cannot survive in the absence of the body)

Or

Is the soul extrinsically related to the body (so that is can survive independent of the body). This is what Plato (and Socrates) maintains and tries to argue.

The plausibility of personal IMMORTALITY becomes the theme of the Phaedo at this point.

Within the Phaedo, there are at least two different conceptions of immortality operating.

The SOUL is a shadowy, etherial, and ghost-like figure in the shape of human beings and which has both consciousness and engages in ordinary human activities in HADES, the inaccessible but visible realm of the souls of those who have died. Souls on this view are not necessarily immaterial, even if they are made of a finer material stuff. Associations in Hades are typically restricted to other people (not gods).

The doctrine of reincarnation derives from Pythagoreanism (6th century B.C.). By the time of Socrates it was often assimilated into the Greek Homeric account (as Socrates explains with reference to the ancient theory of souls going to Hades and coming back again).

2. Socratic/Philosophical Revision:

The soul is an invisible and immaterial substance with consciousness and capacity for pure reasoning. Hades is an invisible and immaterial realm of pure intelligibility (80d6-7) where departed good individuals associate with other good or just people who have died and the gods.

Those who have purified themselves by the pursuit of philosophy go to Hades - a place of the gods and good men (new view of Hades). Those who have been mediocre or bad are reincarnated and faced with opportunity to purify themselves. Those who are real bad are consigned to Tartarus forever - a kind of shadowy prison of evil souls (114e).

Sin = paying attention to the body => reincarnation

Ordinary folk experience reincarnation; philosopher (and evil person) does not.

What exactly survives death?

1. The soul is the same as the person, the "I"? (Phaedo)

2. The soul is the highest part of the person, the reasoning part; but there is also a spirited part (responsible for emotional life and certain desires) and a desiring part (bodily desires). (Republic)

Two different problems:

Two different problems of continuity of personal identity:

If (1), then there are problems with immortality of ordinary persons, for reincarnation poses the problem of continuity of personal identity. Can I be reincarnated in some lower form of life and still be me? What does such a statement mean?

If (1), then there is not a problem of continuity of personal identity stemming from being reincarnated, but rather it is a question of what constitutes personal identity and how much of that is plausible if you think that you are an immaterial substance. How much of the soul must survive for the person to remain intact in the world of forms.

If (2), then how much survives.

Two Problems of disembodied existence:

FIRST, is it plausible to have any personal identity apart from a body?

SECOND, is the survival of mere "pure reasoning" enough to constitute continuity of the self (even if a body is not) What about memories? They appear to be of no use to reasoning.

If the answer to the first is no, then immortality must be something living again in another body.

Socrates wants to prove that:

1. the living come from the dead, and (so)

2. souls do indeed exist in the underworld after we die.

Let x = a substance and P = some property.

(iii) Whatever is alive has come to be alive (implied premise)

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(iv) Whatever comes to be alive comes to be alive from being dead

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(v) Whatever is alive has come to be alive from being dead.

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The argument is valid, but is it sound.

It appears initially that Socrates may be saying something less plausible than I have written, namely

(i*) Whatever comes to have some property previously had the opposite property.

Premise 1 thus understood may be motivated by a truism: a thing cannot become P if it is P already. [cf. a larger (etc) must come into being from a smaller]. But this is compatible with X's coming into existence as a P thing such that it does not make sense to ask what properties it had before it was P. [cf. loud noises do not entail a softer noise developing into a louder noise]. Socrates assumes that the principle excludes all forms of becoming a P-thing other than that of a development out of an already existing but non-P-thing. But why should this be the case?

Two kinds of opposites:

Contrary properties (nothing can have both, but some things may have neither)

e.g., being all red and being all blue or being round and being square

Contradictory Properties (nothing can have both, but everything must have one)

e.g., being all red and not being all red or being round or not being round

WHAT DOES THE ARGUMENT MEAN BY OPPOSITE?

Apparently, Socrates is thinking of contraries because. . . .

a. The examples adduced, ugliness and beautiful and just and unjust are not contradictories, but contraries; for some things may be neither beautiful nor ugly. (some things are plain; some things are morally indifferent)

b. He limits his examples to those cases which have opposites (every property has a contradictory property obtained by negating a property).

BUT IF HE IS THINKING OF CONTRARIES, then (i) is false because, even where properties have opposites, one does not come to have a property P from having the contrary. A beautiful girl was not necessarily ugly before she became beautiful. A guitarist who becomes good was not necessarily bad to begin with. A thing which becomes hot...was it cold before. No it was only not-hot, not-beautiful, not-good.

The principle that if x comes to have a property P, then he previously had the opposite property must mean contradictory opposites.

So we can restate (i) as

[[But Plato's account is vitiated with confusion because he takes also as examples comparative constructions....not clear that they are opposite properties.....]]]

Is being alive the opposite of being dead?

Being alive and being dead are contraries! Nothing can be both; but some things are neither. (e.g., a rock)

Premise (ii) is true only if opposite means contradictory, dead = not-living. This is also demanded if the argument is to be valid, since it was noted above that (i) is true only if "opposite" there means contradictory. The word "opposite" must have the same meaning in all the premises if the argument is to be valid.

But if "opposite" in (ii) means not-living, then things which do not even exist are not-living!

But if (ii) means simply not-alive (by dead) then the conclusion indeed follows:

THOSE WHO ARE ALIVE HAVE COME TO BE ALIVE FROM BEING NOT-ALIVE.

But then the movement to the final conclusion is invalid!!! "Our souls exist in Hades" does not follow. It is invalid. The conclusion will actually be compatible with our souls not existing at all! The argument does not show that anyting lives or dies more than once. Socrates seems to rely on the usual sense of dead (implying having already lived) when in fact the argument is only sound if dead means not-living, in which case the final conclusion will not follow.

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER MOVE. . . .

For any property P,

If things changed from being not-P to being P, but never changed back from being P to being not-P, then in the end everything would be P.

Example: If things that went to sleep never woke up, then eventually there would be a state in which everything was asleep.

Likewise: if things which died never came back to life again, then eventually there wold be a state in which all things were dead.

Must assume: living things exist for a finite period of time.

Objection 1:

Why shouldn't everything end up as dead? (even if matter cannot be destroyed, why should there be an infinite cycle of death and rebirth of living things.

Objection 2:

Socrates assumes that new things never come into existence.

Perhaps each thing has only one life, but during the course of their life they produce new things, and so on......

Objection 3:

Plato believes that some souls escape the wheel of rebirth, either by being so good that they enter the world of the forms or by being so bad that they are confied to Tartarus forever (113e). Some souls do end up forever dead. If no more souls come into existence, will there not come a time when every soul escapes the wheel of rebirth?

Two stages of Plato's Argument

1. Cyclical Argument or argument from opposites

2. Recollection argument: Quality of souls as intellective, but only shows pre-existence.

1. and 2. conjointly do the job (77b1-c5)

Plato seems to favor recollection argument over 1., but some consider 1. and 2. to mutually support the thesis of immortality. But then another argument is needed to show that the soul does not dissolve at death.

The aim is twofold:

(1) show that we pre-existed our birth

(2) show that disembodied existence is intellectual in nature.

Strategy: Show that we know things which we could not have learned after we were born. The object of knowledge here is "a form" (goodness, justice, equality, etc.).

Recollection is occasioned by things which are both similar and dissimilar.

Recollecting X by seeing Y

Recollecting X by seeing a representation of X

Do we ever perceive equality itself?

No.

When we perceive equal things a,b, and c (through the senses) they are different from the equal itself E, but we have a cognition or undrstanding of E when we perceive a,b, and c.

Either perception provides us with this knowledge or nothing in the world can provide the knowledge

Recollection argument:

First Part:

P1. If I perceive an instance of equal things, then I have a conception of "equality" (or a knowledge of the equal itself).

P2. I do perceive an instance of equal things.

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C1. I have a conception of "equality" (or a knowledge of the equal itself). [from (P1) and (P2), modus ponens)

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P3. If I have a conception of "equality" (or a knowledge of the equal itself), then either I learned it from sensory perception or from somewhere else.

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C2. Either I learned it from sense perception or from somewhere else (from (P3) and (C1), modus ponens)

P4.I cannot have learned it from sense perception.

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C3. I must have learned it from somewhere else. (from (C2) and (P4), disjunctive argument)

Here Socrates establishes that there must be a non-empirical element to knowledge.

P4. Is the conclusion of another argument to the effect that sense peception only gives me a knowledge of equal things and these things are different from the equal itself, and also that the equal itself must have been present to the mind before any sense perception, since it is presupposed in all sense perception.

The argument to pre-existence develops from C3 when we add:

P5. knowledge of the equal is pre-sensory perceptional in nature.

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C4. Therefore we must have come to know the equal itself before we had sensory perceptual experience.(corollary of (P5))

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C5. We existed before we were born. (From (C4))

Critique:

(1) The argument only shows that we have a non-empirical element in our knowledge.

(2) A non-empirical element could be in us at the time of birth and developed as we grow.

So, P5 is false. Awareness of the equal itself only shows non-perceptual knowledge, not pre-perceptual. Knowledge of such general truths may have been acquired at birth, not lost at birth. Latent within the mind and of which we become conscious upon occasion (cf. Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant). To recollect p at t1 means that S knew p at tn-1, but tn-1 could be any time after S was born. Socrates’ response to Simmias to the effect that we could not have such knowledge in us at birth for at no other time could we have lost it begs the question, for obviously if we lost it at birth we must have had it before birth. Bu why talk about forgetting or losing this knowledge in the first place. Presumably because we are not aware of these things until some point in time. But there can be latent knowledge (in the unconscious) or merely a non-empirical capacity to know the forms whichis actualized and exercised as we mentally develop.

(3) The argument, if it works, only shows pre-existence, not post-mortem existence.

Argument from Recollection shows only that the soul pre-existed. Will it continue to live after death (recall first argument). So Socrates develops a second argument.

1. changeless => noncomposite

2. General terms are changeless and so noncomposite.

3. Apprehension of general truths suggests a nature like them (cf. "like is known by like")

Bodies and Terms

So what knows forms must be like the forms. As the forms are immutable, so the soul is too. But if the soul ceased to exist, it would not be immutable. Therefore, knowledge of the forms in this life implies a conformity to the nature of the things known which guarantees that the soul will continue to exist after death.

Critique:

Well, how much like the forms is the soul? Seems we need a more detailed argument for the exact way in which the soul is like the forms to guarantee post-mortem existence. The appeal to lack of composition and immateriality of soul seems inconsistent with the many functions of the soul in the Phaedo (e.g., knowing many things, moving from place to place). Surely the soul experiences some changes. The argument needs further filling out to be plausible.

© Michael Sudduth 1996