Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [139]
Plato was not exactly saying that our consciousness (in the modern sense of the word) makes us immortal or even that consciousness itself is worth preserving. The focus on consciousness in the West is a peculiarly modern, philosophical issue. Plato himself was not so impressed with the ordinary sense of consciousness as a continuous mental monitoring, at least as compared with other kinds of mental actions. He thought of consciousness as just the background noise of our significant mental life, just the awareness that our souls are combined with matter, the awareness that we are “awake” or the monitor is “on,” so to speak. That was not a high-order process for Plato. Rather it is something everyone has with or without education or training or virtue, something to be left behind gladly when our souls escape from their bodily imprisonment. Plato rather connected rationality with meditation (both in the sense of concentration and in the sense of entering an altered state of consciousness) as well as with practical reason and suggested that there was a philosophical value in meditation and high-order mentation.
The act of “recollecting,” a necessary predecessor to abstract thinking, was part of the process of forming ideas and gaining knowledge according to Plato. That was a symptom of the soul’s immortality, the very process that underlined why the soul had to be immortal. Thus, the soul’s education was what made for personal completion; it needed to be developed to its most refined potential. We might think of the process of thinking as one of conceiving ideas. Of all the possible ideas, the idea of conceiving the self was the most important. In this sense we can define the goal of thinking, finally, to be critical “self-consciousness.” This is a high-order mentation both for Plato and for Aristotle. Indeed, it was Aristotle who first talked about the mind thinking itself and thinking of the Good, and the Good, in turn, as a mind thinking of all things, to which our own minds are analogous in their limited and passive way. Furthermore, Plato felt that personal deportment should be governed by what made the intellectual life easiest to accomplish.
This new definition of immortality is an enormous change from Greek tradition. Odysseus’ goal was to build fame for himself as a military hero and ruler. To this end, he could fight, lie, cheat, womanize, murder, and otherwise carry on-all for the purpose of achieving a good homecoming and a balanced state. But Plato’s immortality could be sought and won by anyone who developed his or her powers of thought, not just the heroic man of arms. In order to achieve the goal, the intellectual adventurer would have to promote moderation in behavior, deportment, and ethics-an enormous change from the life that Odysseus lived.
Plato’s immortality was open to all but it was not democratic in the sense that everyone had an equal right to achieve it. Plato’s notion was, in fact, elitist because it valorized intellectual life above every other kind of human activity as far as achieving the soul’s ultimate purpose. Not everyone could achieve an intellectual life; one needed leisure and long years of education to follow the philosophical life which Plato recommended. Yet, by comparison to the goals outlined by Homer, the life of the intellectual was available to many. Though Plato took the immortality of the soul seriously, we can turn his perception around and note that to make the higher faculties of the soul immortal was also to make an important claim about the intellectual elite in the society, to valorize intellectuality as transcendently important. It was certainly a first step in defining the “self” in Western philosophy and altogether necessary for understanding the orgy of self-consciousness that has dominated Western philosophy in the modern period.
Plato’s Forms
THE NEXT STEP in the proof of the immortality of the soul depends on Plato’s notion that there are entities called the “forms” or “ideas” of all the material bodies on earth:
If those realities