Besides transcendental Forms and sensible objects, there is one other basic building block for Plato: souls. Souls are discussed at length in Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue in which Plato introduces his new theory of reality. The central concern of the dialogue is to argue for the immortality of soul. In a dramatic way. For the Phaedo portrays the death of Plato’s hero, Socrates, in the prison of Athens, after he has been condemned to death. Socrates’ young friends Simmias and Cebes are not convinced that the soul is immortal. With the encouragement of Socrates, they offer arguments against immortality of soul. Socrates, who is condemned to die at sundown, has exactly one day to convince his skeptical friends, his other followers and, perhaps, himself, that he will survive the experience.
Socrates offers five arguments for the immortality of soul. 1) Argument from opposites. Change is from one state to its opposite. People come to be dead from being alive. But, by the same token, they come to be alive from being dead. 2) Argument from recollection. We judge things to fall short of perfection. Thus we have prior knowledge of some things. This could only come from recollection, from a previous life. Hence we lived before our present life and will live after it. 3) Argument from simplicity. Things that are complex can fall apart, while things that are simple cannot. The body is complex, but the soul is simple. Therefore the body is mortal, but the soul is immortal. 4) (Against the objection that the soul is a harmony of body, and must dissipate when the body dies) the soul rules the body, and so is prior to the body, not posterior to it and dependent on it. Hence the soul survives the body. 5) (Against the objection that the soul might outlast several bodies, as a tailor might outlive several suits he had made, but would still perish eventually along with his last suit) some Forms partake of other Forms, as Fire partakes of Heat and Snow of Cold. The soul partakes of Life and accordingly is incompatible with Death and destruction. So the soul must be deathless and imperishable.
This is not the place to examine Plato’s arguments for immortality, other than to note that Plato seems to save his best argument for last, and to employ his Theory of Forms to justify the immortality of souls as a final tour de force. He also draws on the slave boy episode of his earlier dialogue Meno, in which an uneducated slave boy makes “discoveries” in the science of geometry by “recollecting” truths from a previous life.[1] Thus Plato seems to put his seal of approval on the theory of recollection, which was introduced in the Meno as a borrowing from religious beliefs.[2]
Immortality of soul is not a belief Plato shared with the historical Socrates. In the early dialogue Apology of Socrates, which purports at least to recount Socrates’ defense speech at his very public trial, Socrates is agnostic about immortality. He seems to look forward to the possibility of an afterlife, which would give him the opportunity to interview famous figures of the past about their philosophical and moral beliefs. But he does not in any way base his own theory or moral commitments on a belief in immortality. Rather, he dismisses questions of the life and death of the agent as irrelevant to moral judgments.[3] In the middle dialogues, Plato’s Socrates explicitly argues for immortality of soul. In this way, Plato is forging a new path in his philosophical development by endorsing immortality of soul.
Plato goes on to elaborate implications and speculations about the immortal soul in his middle dialogues. Toward the end of the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates describes an afterlife in which the souls of mortals are judged after their deaths. In the spherical earth Plato envisages, there are four mythical rivers that flow into a porous underworld. The souls of good persons are sent to live on the surface of the earth. Those who are especially philosophical go to a kind of heaven. The wicked are sent into the bowels of the earth for a kind of purgatory, to be punished for their sins. Eventually, every soul will be reincarnated except for the enlightened philosophers, who will not need to prove themselves further, and a few incurable souls who will remain in Tartarus, Plato’s hell.[4]
In the early books of the Republic, Plato uses the image of a state composed of three classes of people to illuminate the soul. The soul, too, consists of three parts, the reason, the thumos or spirited part, and the desiring or appetitive part. And the soul is virtuous by analogy with the virtuous city.[5] The soul, however, is no longer simple, as Plato had maintained in the Phaedo, but complex.
At the end of the Republic,Plato argues for immortality of soul, and finally recognizes virtue as the proper fulfilment of soul, and human and divine rewards as inevitably accruing to the righteous soul.[6] He goes on to recount the myth of Er, who had what would now be called a near-death experience and saw how souls were reincarnated, and how a conventionally just soul, because of his goodness in a previous life, was given first choice of the life he would lead in his next incarnation. This soul hastily chose to be a tyrant, because he had not seen the light through a philosophical understanding of the good. In the fine print of the new life contract, he subsequently found that he was fated to commit atrocities and apparently to come to a bad end. So it is not enough to be virtuous because you perceive it is to your present advantage; you must choose virtue because you know it is good.[7]
In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates describe souls as like a chariot team in which a driver directs two winged horses. This evidently is meant to describe the three parts of the soul, the reason (driver); the thumos or, as we might say, the heart (one horse); and the desires (second horse). Between incarnations, human souls mingle with the gods, who are also represented as chariot teams with docile horses. When the gods depart for a feast, they leave their home and rise up on the lower circle of heaven, and there they behold the Forms like constellations, and are filled with joy and goodness. The souls of mortals, who follow the procession of gods, find it difficult to keep up with them, because the mortals’ unruly horses resist their masters’ commands. Consequently most of the drivers see little or none of the Forms, while the fortunate few, those with more obedient beasts, get to have a vision of them. Those that fail to see the Forms are reincarnated into the bodies of animals, while those who have glimpsed or beheld the Forms are reborn into human bodies. For only those who have viewed or re-experienced the Forms can enjoy rational thought.[8]
Plato speculates further on the life of souls in the Timaeus. The Demiurge, the divine Architect of the universe, creates souls from the mixing bowl he had used to prepare the soul stuff of the World Soul. He created them equal in number to the stars of the sky, assigning one soul to each star. Each one would be incarnated into the world and tested. The souls who did well would return to their stars to live in bliss. Those who did not live up to expectations would be reborn as a woman or (worse) a wild beast having a similar character to the errant soul. The Architect turned over the details of constructing bodies to the gods described in mythology, who would oversee the completion of the project.[9]
In perhaps his final, and certainly most extensive, work, the Laws, Plato argues at length for a theodicy, a defense of God or the gods, as the ruler of the universe. He recognizes a wide-ranging teleology whereby the world is arranged for the best by the Director or Supervisor (Epimeloumenos) of the universe.[10] The Supervisor arranges for souls, which are assigned to different bodies at different times (in their reincarnations),[11] to progress or backslide according to their free choices. There is a law of rewards and punishments that no soul can escape.[12] And, as Plato goes on to argue, the gods cannot be bribed or bought off either.[13] In general, the heavenly bodies either are gods or are directed by gods. To say that the cosmos operates by mechanical forces is impious and false.[14] Soul is, as Plato had said in the Phaedrus, prior to and in control of matter, and is cognizant of the transcendent Forms.[15]
[1] Plato Phaedo 72e-73b.
[2] Plato Meno 81a-e.
[3] Plato Apology 29a-b,40c-41c; compare Plato Crito 48b-d.
[4] Plato Phaedo 110b-114c.
[5] Plato Republic 4, 435a-442d.
[6] Plato Republic 10, 608d-613.
[7] Plato Republic 10, 614b-621b. On the moral of the story, 619b-e, 621c-d.
[8] Plato Phaedrus 245a-249b.
[9] Plato Timaeus 41d-42e; on the birth of the gods, Plato follows religious traditions as depicted in Hesiod, without innovating, presumably in part to avoid any appearance of impiety, Timaeus 40d-41a.
[10] Plato Laws 10, 903b-d.
[11] Plato Laws 10, 903d.
[12] Plato Laws 10, 904a-905d.
[13] Plato Laws 10, 905d-907b; on the possibility of bribing the gods with offerings, see Plato Republic 2, 364b-366d.
[14] Plato Laws 10, 967a-d
[15] Plato Phaedrus 245c-e, 248c; Laws 12, 967d-968a; 965b-e.