Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [137]
In fact, Simmias, he said, those who practise philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men. Consider it from this point of view: if they are altogether estranged from the body and desire to have their soul by itself, would it not be quite absurd for them to be afraid and resentful when this happens? If they did not gladly set out for a place, where, on arrival, they may hope to attain that for which they had yearned during their lifetime, that is wisdom, and where they would be rid of the presence of that from which they are estranged? (Phaed. 67e-68a)
For Platonic philosophy, asceticism-eschewing of the extremes of pleasure-among the aristocracy is what trains the mind to philosophy and to a noble death. Socrates then tries to demonstrate that these observations taken from experience are accurate to the truths of existence but that behind them are several a priori assumptions about the soul. Socrates tries to demonstrate that these assumptions are provable. But the proofs are interwoven with a number of arguments taken from religious tradition and observation. Throughout the centuries there has been a noticeable lack of consensus about what his argument actually is. I will try one way to unpack the arguments.
Socrates begins by setting up a series of forced decisions. Life and death are opposites, just as sleep and waking are opposites. Just as waking comes from sleep and vice versa; so life comes from death and vice versa. This takes us back to Socrates’ original observation that pain and pleasure are opposites that come from each other. It will also become important in his last argument that the soul is the very thing which defines life; therefore, it cannot be its opposite. Furthermore, as he has said previously, living comes from death in the way wakefulness comes from sleep. Socrates posits as a fact of life, observed closely, that opposites come one from another.
Since life comes from non-life, Plato tries to show that there is something more basic than either, a substance that underlies the change in status, a “person” as it were, who can come awake and go to sleep, a “soul” who can be alive or dead. He posits this “person” or “self” or “soul” existed previously to our birth by suggesting that we know things that we have not learned. To demonstrate that the soul preexists individual lives, Socrates uses our notion of recollection, suggesting that the basic categories of space, time, equality and inequality and other values are innate, not learned, so that the soul must precede the body.
Throughout the middle dialogues and particularly in the Meno (81d-86b), Plato talks about the importance of recollection. We all have had the experience of remembering something that we have previously learned and forgotten. This experience Plato closely identifies with learning. To reason something out is the same as recollecting it for Philo. In the Meno, Socrates asks a slave boy to reason out a problem and repeatedly insists that he is not teaching him. The learning process comes from within himself. For this reason, Plato seems to feel that all learning is closely akin to recollecting. Since it is recollecting, we must have known it before. Thus recollecting is a far broader intellectual process for Plato than it usually is for us. In the Phaedo, this statement is allowed to stand for itself.
Let us move on to the crucial religious (and usually unnoticed) aspect of this proof: Plato grounds the immortality of the soul on intellectual activity. Plato says that memory of the basic categories of comparison-qualities like: “more than,” “less