Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [140]
Socrates does not try to demonstrate the forms here. He merely suggests that if the soul exists, it must be one of the forms or ideas. It would follow that what Socrates attempted to demonstrate for the soul would be true for all of the forms, though that is not explicitly discussed. But Socrates was not purposely excluding arguments. He attempted to address a further, plaguing issue: Perhaps souls do exist but although they preexist our bodies, they do not continue to exist after death or after a series of lives. It is also possible that the soul is a harmony, not a being in itself but a relationship between the parts, what we would today call an emergent property, which would die with the body and even devolve prior to demise. This latter possibility, refuted by Socrates, comes rather close to modern notions of the self.
Socrates still needed to demonstrate that the soul does not dissolve after death or, stranger yet, wear out after having inhabited several bodies. To demonstrate that the soul is indissoluble at death, just as he previously demonstrated that it preexists birth, Socrates again had to return to the issue of the forms-the good, the beautiful, and so forth (Phaed. 100b). Socrates distinguishes between the properties and the form of a thing by showing that “cold” is not the same as the “snow,” nor “heat” as the “fire.” He then defined the soul as the thing that brings life to a person, in total opposition of death (Phaed. 105d).
Socrates then took the next step, based on an observation accepted at the very beginning of the dialogue: He states that life and death come from the same thing and follow each other but cannot exist in the same object at the same time. He then suggested the solution to the conundrum: What makes something alive is the presence of a soul; what kills it is the departure of the soul. This is precisely analogous to claiming that snow is cold because it contains a substance called cold and fire is hot because it contains a substance called heat, and that these substances are separable from the objects that host them. Soul and life are different names for the same essence. The soul itself remains alive, indeed must remain alive by definition, because it is the life and has already been proven both to precede the body and outlive it.
This was not so much a logical proof as an analogy, the mental realization of a kind of symmetry. If Plato’s analysis of objects and attributes was wrong, then his proof fails. Following this logic, we wind up with a definition of soul as the form or idea of life, something which is immortal by definition and depends on the prior assumption that the forms or ideas of everything on earth are the immortal plans for producing them.
The Platonic soul that survives death is not a “personal” soul in our modern sense of the word. Aristotle seemed even less sure that the immortal aspects of the soul contain our “personality.” The personalization of the soul is a hypothesis for a later period-for Plotinus and especially Augustine (see ch. 14). Imperfect though the proof may be, it was on this demonstration that Plato’s Socrates staked his life. In a way, he was a martyr for the notion of the immortal soul. And, indeed, the Western notion of the soul, even as mediated by Christianity, eventually depended on this dialogue of Plato, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses.
There are, however, some aspects of the proof, which Christianity has understandably repressed. Socrates suggested that we