Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [138]
We may doubt the validity of the argument. Aristotle, Plato’s own pupil, did, proclaiming that our intelligence is at birth a tabula rasa, to use the familiar Medieval, Aristotelian technical term. After all, Jean Piaget shows that we learn these categories, and not all that very early in our lives.41 Piaget holds that there is an age at which children think that there is “more” milk in the tall, thin glass than in the short, fat glass, even after they have been explicitly shown the milk pouring from one to another, making it perfectly obvious to any adult that the glasses contain the same amount of milk. Then, after a certain age, children do realize that the milk is “the same.” So it looks as though this is a learned quality, not an innate one. And Aristotle would certainly have brought this up, had he been privy to Piaget’s experiments. Of course, Plato might object by claiming that younger children really did know that the milk in the two containers were equal, they just did not have the vocabulary yet to express it, using “more” when they meant “taller.”
The point is not whether Plato was correct in his logical steps or his epistemology. The point is that the proof of immortality of the soul depends, right at this crucial point very pregnantly, on an act of thinking. It is a particular mentition-“recollection,” anamnesis, in Greek-which indissolubly links immortality of the soul with our internal psychological “selves.” This has the effect of turning thinking into a transcendent act.
Why Plato included so many thinking processes under the topic of “recollection” is not entirely clear but he was followed in some ways by his brightest student, Aristotle. Perhaps it is because the Greek word anamimneskesthai, translated as “to recollect,” is the passive form of the verb “to remind” modified with the prepositional prefix ana-, meaning “again.” “To recollect,” anamimneskesthai, literally means “to be reminded again” in Greek, though neither “to remember” nor “to recollect” in English contain this connotation. Recollection, Plato says, involves “one thing putting you in mind of another” (Phaed. 73c-74d), which is understandable if the connotation of the verb is “to be reminded again” but relatively distant from the simple meaning of the English verbs “remember” or “recollect.”42
Plato included many different mental faculties in his terminology for recollection. He was not just offering a proof of immortality. He was, at the same time, describing a whole new way to define the self, as a consistent, recollecting person with a personal history of memories. In the end, Plato essentially linked thinking with our selves and used it to demonstrate that the act of thinking is what grounds the immortality of the soul.
This is a quite different notion than any idea of immortality we have so far investigated. Immortality or the lack of it in myth was always linked to the performance of heroic, cultic, or ritual actions in society. It was sought or denied as part of a hero’s quest. Immortality was linked to the body by the Persians, as it is by apocalyptic Jews who articulate resurrection of the body. But this is the first time in history that it is explicitly linked with a mental act. What Plato called “recollection” includes a great many mental processes which we in English might call discovery, reasoning, and logical analysis.43
Plato’s argument is even more striking when we realize that he surely knew the Greek myth that the soul forgets everything upon crossing the river Lethe on its way to be born. Indeed, the word for “truth” (alētheia) in Greek was frequently glossed as “without forgetting” (as a folk etymology). Plato did not feel that the soul forgot everything as that would destroy his demonstration of its preexistence of the body. Plato was essentially saying that it is our mentation which survives death, no matter how many other faculties