Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [144]
The story confirms that justice exists in the universe by claiming that the voyage is parallel to the one which the soul will take at death. Its purpose is to warn men of the implications of their actions upon the earth and exhort them to righteousness. One of the dominant motifs is that of the agōn, the athletic contest. The soul struggles in life as in athletic games and thereafter receives the trophy of astral afterlife as a reward for its victory. Plato seemingly had his doubts about the details of such tales but ended with this gentle correction:
But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever.” (Resp. 10.620e)
The soul’s salvation for Plato was quintessentially an individual process. The soul is on an individual mission to purify itself. It travels through many bodies and cleanses itself from the impurities it gathers in human society. The intellectual achievement of the redemption of the soul is an individual process, though it may find what little solace adheres to life in a community of like-minded individuals. This contrasts quite strongly with the communal and sectarian nature of resurrection of the body in its Iranian and Jewish versions.
Aristotle on the Afterlife
ALTHOUGH Aristotle accepted Plato’s valorization of nous, mind, he subjected Plato’s thought to the most penetrating criticism. For Aristotle all philosophical problems could be best understood from the point of view of epistemology, the science of thinking. “All men by nature desire to know” is the first sentence of Metaphysics; everything flows from this perception. Like Plato, Aristotle believed the real is the intelligble, the intelligible real. But he offered an important qualification. The rational soul, Aristotle noted, does not discover an alien world when it apprehends anything. Rather it comes into possession of itself. Knowledge comes to us, first of all, from our own observations, from our senses. The process of thinking (noesis), and even more so scientific thinking (epistēmē), is nothing more than perceiving the form of the object from the object itself.
The mind (nous), then, must be extracting the form of an object from the mind’s sense perceptions of the object. If that is so, there need not be a separate world of forms to explain our thinking. The form is the principle or underlying order that we perceive in something. For Aristotle, Plato had separated the forms from sensible things too sharply, giving rise to a dubious sense of a separate metaphysical world of ideas. Though our souls know (as opposed to perceive) only ideas, the world in which the ideas subsist is logically the mind. Aristotle therefore could say that the soul is a perfect receptivity; the later Latin is tabula rasa, an empty slate. If so, there is nothing in the soul originally to recollect.
It remains to speak about recollecting. First, then, one must take as being the case all that is true in the essays. For recollection is neither the recovery nor the acquisition of memory. For when someone first learns or experiences something, he does not recover any memory, since none has preceded. Nor does he acquire memory from the start, for once the state or affection has been produced within a person, then there is memory. (Mem. rem. 451a, 18)46
Aristotelian philosophy, then, does not support Plato’s proof for the immortality of the soul.
Aristotle directly criticized the theory that “learning” is “recollection” in the Prior Analytics (67a, 8-27) and the Posterior Analytics (71a, 30-71b, 8). His understanding of recollection is confined to the special case of learning, namely