Plato Theory of Immortality

Plato Theory of Immortality The Phaedo-inspired discourse is intriguing in a number of ways. It claims to depict Socrates' last moments, including his talk right before he drank the hemlock and the minutes that followed until he passed out. This embodies Plato's ideal of a man who is completely fearless of dying, extremely intelligent and virtuous, and both. Plato's portrayal of Socrates in the face of death has significant ethical implications for both ancient and contemporary societies. For those who were pagans or free-thinking philosophers, the Phaedo served as what the gospel story of the Passion and the Crucifixion did for Christians. * However, Socrates' conviction in immortality accounts for his imperturbability in his final hour, and the Phaedo plays a significant role in laying out other concepts that became Christian dogma in addition to the martyrdom of a martyr. Without acknowledging Plato, it is difficult to comprehend the theology of the Fathers and of St. Paul, which was heavily influenced by him, either directly or indirectly. An earlier discourse, the Crito, describes how some of Socrates' friends and followers set up a scheme to allow him to flee to Thessaly. It is possible that the Athenian authorities would have welcomed his departure, and the proposed plan had a high probability of success. But Socrates was having none of it. He argued that it would be improper to do anything criminal in order to escape punishment because he had been found guilty via a fair judicial procedure. Then, imagining himself in a dialogue with the laws of Athens, he asserts the principle that "we ought not to retaliate evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him." They point out that he owes them the same kind of respect that a son owes to a father or a slave to his master, but to a much greater extent, and that every Athenian citizen is free to emigrate if he dislikes the Athenian State. The rules say, "Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up," to wrap up a lengthy lecture. It is important to choose justice above life and children so that you might be justified in the eyes of the world's princes below. Because if you follow Crito's instructions, neither you nor anybody who belongs to you will be happier, holier, or more just in this life or another. You now leave in innocence, a victim of people rather than the law, a sufferer rather than a doer of evil. We will be furious with you while you are still alive, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will view you as an enemy because they will know that you have tried your hardest to destroy us. However, if you go forth, returning evil for evil and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements that you have made with us and wronging those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is, yourself, your friends, your country, and us. Socrates describes this voice as "I seem to hear humming in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the mystic's ears," and as a result, he determines that it is his responsibility to remain and carry out the death sentence. It is now the last hour in the Phaedo; his chains are removed and he is free to talk with his pals. In order to prevent his wife's sadness from interfering with the conversation, he sends his sobbing spouse away. Socrates starts off by saying that while a person with a philosophical spirit will not be afraid of death—in fact, they would embrace it—they will not commit suicide since it is morally wrong. When his companions ask him why suicide is considered illegal, he responds that it is because of Orphic ideology, which is virtually precisely what a Christian would reply. He compares the relationship between humans and God to that of cattle and says, "There may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as he is now summoning me." He is not grieved at death because he is convinced that "in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of which I am as certain as I can be of any such matters), and secondly (though I am not so sure of this last) to men departed, better than those whom I leave behind." Death, according to Socrates, is the division of the soul and body. "I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, some far better thing for the good than for the evil." Plato introduces us to the dualism between appearance and reality, concepts and sensible objects, sense perception and reason, and soul and body. These two pairings are related because, in both actuality and goodness, the first in each pair is superior than the second. The logical result of this duality was an austere morality. Christianity never fully embraced this theory, although it did accept it in part. There were two challenges. The first was that if Plato was correct, then the Creator could not be benevolent as the creation of the visible universe had to have been a wicked crime. The second was that, although believing celibacy to be more honorable, orthodox Christianity could never bring itself to reject marriage. In both areas, the Manichaeans were more reliable. The division of soul and body was the theological forerunner of the separation between mind and matter, which is now widely accepted in philosophy, science, and popular opinion. As we have seen, the Orphic declares himself to be a child of both the starry heavens and the ground; the body is born of heaven, and the soul is born of earth. Plato aims to convey this viewpoint using philosophical terminology. In the Phaedo, Socrates immediately develops the ascetic implications of his teaching; nonetheless, his asceticism is restrained and gentlemanly. He just says that the philosopher shouldn't be a slave to common pleasures, not that he should completely forgo them. It is not suggested that the philosopher fast; rather, he should only consume as much as is necessary. The philosopher should not worry about food or drink. Furthermore, it is said that despite his lack of preference for wine, Socrates occasionally drank more than everyone else without ever getting wasted. He criticized the pleasure of drinking, not the act of drinking itself. Similarly, the philosopher should not be bothered with the joys of love, expensive clothing, sandals, or any other personal accessories. “He would like, as far as he can, to get away from the body and to turn to the soul” is his only concern, and it must be the sole focus. It is evident that this ideology, if it were to become widespread, would become austere, but it is not ascetic in the true sense of the word. The philosopher will not consciously resist the pleasures of sensation but will instead be occupied with other thoughts. Several philosophers I have met have studied books instead of eating when they finally remembered to eat. These individuals were behaving as Plato instructs them to: they were more preoccupied with other issues than refraining from excess via moral effort. It seems that the philosopher ought to get married, procreate, and raise kids in the same careless manner, but this has been harder since women are no longer considered property. Xanthippe being a shrew, it makes sense. Plato appears to be endorsing the belief held by a certain group of moralists that bodily pleasures are the only things that matter in this passage. Socrates continues, "Philosophers attempt to sever the soul from communion with the body, whereas others think that life is not worth living for a man who has "no sense of pleasure and no part in bodily pleasure." According to these moralists, a person who abstains from sensual pleasures must be leading a moral life and forgoing all forms of pleasure. This mistake has caused a great deal of harm. The worst pleasures, including jealousy, many types of cruelty, and the desire of power, are mental inasmuch as the distinction of mind and body can be acknowledged. Milton's Satan overcomes bodily suffering and dedicates himself to doing havoc, from which he gets pure mental pleasure. Numerous notable clergy members gave up sensual pleasures and relaxed their guardianship, allowing their love of power to take control. This led them to commit heinous acts of cruelty and persecution, ostensibly in the name of religion. Hitler fits this description in our day and age; by all accounts, he is not greatly interested in the joys of sense. grandeur is influenced by being freed from the body's slavery, yet grandeur in sin and greatness in virtue are equally important. But this is a side note, and we should go back to Socrates. Now, let's discuss the intellectual side of religion, which Plato, whether correctly or not, gives to Socrates. It is said that the body is an impediment to knowledge acquisition and that senses—sight and hearing—are false witnesses. The soul is only given a glimpse of genuine existence through thinking, not sensation. Let's ponder the consequences of this concept for a little while. It entails the total denial of all empirical knowledge, including all geographic and historical information. We are unable to confirm the existence of Athens or Socrates; his bravery in dying as well as his demise are confined to the realm of appearance. We can only learn anything about this by sight and hearing, yet a good philosopher rejects both of these senses. So what's left to him? First, mathematics and logic, but these are speculative and do not support any universal conclusion about the real world. The concept of the good provides the basis for the following—and most important—step. After coming to this conclusion, the philosopher should be able to deduce that the world of ideas is the real world as they should know that the good is the real. Plato seems to have taken the identity of the real and the good for granted, but later thinkers would have had proof. If we want to comprehend him, we have to assume this assumption is true in the hypothetical. From this Socrates moves on to the ideas or forms or essences. At this point, Socrates says that thought is best when the mind is gathered into itself, and is not troubled by sounds or sights, pain or pleasure, but takes leave of the body and aspires after true being; "and in this the philosopher dishonors the body." Though they are invisible to the human eye, there is ultimate goodness, perfect beauty, and absolute justice. All of these are only visible to the intellectually observant. "And I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything." Our need for truth will thus remain unquenchable as long as we live in the body and as long as the soul harbors the vices of the body. This viewpoint disqualifies scientific experimentation and observation as means of acquiring knowledge. The experimenter's consciousness is not "gathered into itself" and is not focused on blocking out images or noises. Mystic insight and mathematics are the two types of mental activity that can be followed along the path that Plato suggests. This explains how the Pythagoreans and Plato came to integrate these two so closely. The body is what connects us to the outside world, according to empiricists, but according to Plato, it is also a source of lusts that divert us from seeking knowledge and the vision of truth, and it distorts our perception of the universe, making it appear as though we are seeing through a glass darkly. I'll illustrate this with a few quotes. The body is a never-ending source of trouble for us simply because it needs food, and it can also become ill and impede our quest for true existence. It makes us full of loves, lusts, fears, and various kinds of fancies, as well as endless foolishness, and, as people say, it even takes away our ability to think. From where do conflicts, battles, and factions arise? From where else could it come but from the body and its lusts? The love of money is the root of all wars, and money must be obtained for the benefit of the body and its needs. Additionally, we are unable to devote time to philosophy due to these obstacles. Finally, even in the rare moments when we do have free time, the body constantly snoops on us, confusing and upsetting our investigations and keeping us from realizing the truth. Experience has shown us that in order to truly know anything, we must let go of the body—the soul must see things for itself. Only then will we be able to achieve the wisdom we seek and declare ourselves to be lovers—not while we are still alive, but after we pass away. This is because the soul cannot have pure knowledge while it is in union with the body; knowledge must be attained after death, if at all. As a result, after we have shed the body's folly, we will be pure, able to communicate with other pure people, and aware of the bright light that is the truth all around us. Because it is forbidden for the impure to get near the pure. Furthermore, what does cleansing entail if not the soul's separation from the body? Death is the phrase used to describe this release and separation of the spirit from the body. And the only thinkers who truly strive to free the soul are they. Wisdom is the one real currency that everything should be exchanged for. When the creators of the mysteries hinted long ago that someone who enters the world below unpurified and unsanctified will lie in a slough, but that someone who enters after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods, it would seem that they had a real meaning and weren't just talking gibberish. Many are the thyrsus-bearers, as they say in the mysteries, but few are the mystics, or, as I understand the phrase, the actual philosophers. This entire language stems from the mysteries and is mystical in nature. Although the term of "purity" is Orphic and largely refers to ritual, for Plato it signifies liberation from the body and its demands. It's fascinating to learn that he believes money is just necessary for the body's needs and that the desire of money is what starts conflicts. While the second part of this statement corresponds to a completely distinct perspective, the first half is the same as Marx's. It is undoubtedly true that Plato believes a man might survive on very little money if his demands were little. However, he also believes that a philosopher ought to be excused from manual labor, meaning that he should survive off the riches that others have generated. Philosophers are not likely to exist in a really bad state. Philosophy was made available for Athenians to learn thanks to the imperialism of Pericles' Athens. In general, the cost of intellectual products is comparable to that of more tangible things, and it is essentially unchanged by the state of the economy. Libraries, labs, telescopes, microscopes, and other equipment are necessary for science, and scientists must rely on the work of others to support them. However, all of this is nonsense to the mystic. Because he is enlightened in spirit, a holy man in Tibet or India wears just a loin cloth, lives off of rice, and requires no machinery. He also receives very little charity. This is how Plato's viewpoint logically develops. Going back to the Phaedo, Cebes questions if the soul survives death and asks Socrates to defend his position. He goes on to achieve this, however it has to be acknowledged that the reasoning is rather weak. The first argument, which is reminiscent of Anaximander's theories of cosmic justice, holds that anything that has an opposite is created from its opponent. Since death and life are now opposites, one must produce the other. It follows that deceased people's spirits exist someplace and eventually return to earth. The adage from Saint Paul, "the seed is not quickened except it die," appears to be consistent with this viewpoint. The second argument holds that since knowledge is memory, the soul must have existed before to birth. The main argument in favor of the notion that knowledge is memory is the existence of concepts like precise equality that cannot be acquired from experience. We know what we mean when we say "absolute equality," even if we have only experienced approximation equality. Since we haven't learned this from experience, we must have carried this information over from a prior incarnation. He claims that the same reasoning holds true for all other concepts. The pre-existence of the soul with knowledge is therefore demonstrated by the presence of essences and our ability to comprehend them. The Meno (82 ff.) develops the argument that all knowledge is memory in greater detail. Here, Socrates asserts that "there is no teaching, only recollection," and he calls in a slave-boy from Meno to test him on mathematical concepts in an attempt to establish his case. The boy's responses are meant to demonstrate that, despite his prior ignorance, he is a true geometric expert. Both the Meno and the Phaedo get to the same conclusion—that knowledge is carried over from a past life by the soul. First of all, one might note that the reasoning has no bearing whatsoever on empirical knowledge in this regard. The slave-boy had to have been there for these events in order for him to be led to "remember" when the Pyramids were constructed or if the siege of Troy actually took place. The only information that can be presumed to exist in every individual independently of experience is the so-called a priori knowledge, which includes logic and mathematics in particular. Actually, Plato acknowledges that this is the only type of knowledge that truly exists (apart from mystic insight). Let's see how the mathematical argument can be satisfied. Consider the idea of equality. We have to acknowledge that we only see approximate equality among sensory items; we have no experience with precise equality. So how do we come up with the concept of perfect equality? Or possibly we don't know such a thing? Let's look at a specific example. The length of a specific rod in Paris at a specific temperature is the definition of a meter. If we stated that the length of another rod was precisely one meter, what would it mean? We shouldn't mean anything, in my opinion. We may state that our rod is neither longer nor shorter than the standard meter in Paris, according to the most precise measuring techniques now available to science. If we were feeling very bold, we could even include a prediction that this outcome won't change if measuring methods are improved in the future. However, this remains an empirical claim, meaning that it might be refuted at any time by actual data. I don't think we actually have the concept of perfect equality that Plato believes we do. Even so, it is evident that no kid has it until they reach a specific age and that experience elicits the notion rather than drawing it straight from it. Furthermore, if our pre-birth existence did not involve sense perception, it would have been just as incapable of producing the notion as this life is; and because our pre-birth existence is assumed to have included some supersensibility, why not assume the same thing about our current existence? The argument is invalid on all of these points. Socrates applies himself to this, as Cebes states that the doctrine of reminiscence is thought to be established. "About half of what was required has been proven; to wit, that our souls existed before we were born:—that the soul will exist after death as well as before birth is the other half of which the proof is still wanting." According to his explanation, death must produce life in the same proportion as life produces death since everything is created from its opposite. However, he also makes the longer-standing philosophical claim that the soul is simple and not made up of pieces, and that only things that are complicated may be dissolved. It is believed that anything basic has no beginning, middle, or end. Certain essences, like ultimate beauty, never change; in contrast, beautiful objects undergo constant change. As a result, what is seen is fleeting, while what is invisible is permanent. The soul belongs to the category of everlasting things since it is unseen in contrast to the body, which is visible. The contemplation of essences, which are everlasting, is where the soul feels most at home. However, while contemplating the world of changing objects, as in sense-perception, the soul becomes disoriented and perplexed. When the soul uses the body as a means of perception, that is, when it uses the senses of sight, hearing, or any other sense (because the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses), the body drags it into the area of the changeable, where it wanders and becomes confused. The world revolves around her, and when she touches change, she acts like a drunkard. But when she looks within herself again, she enters a different realm where she finds her kindred. She lives with them forever when she is by herself and is not allowed or hindered; at that point, she stops making mistakes and enters into communion with the unchanging, which is itself unchanging. Wisdom is the name given to this state of the soul. After passing away, the soul of a true philosopher—which during life was freed from the bonds of the flesh—will travel to the realm of the invisible to live in bliss with the gods. However, the impure soul, having loved the body, will either take on the form of an animal, like a wolf, hawk, or ass, or it will become a ghost haunting the grave. A man who has acted morally without becoming a philosopher will turn into an ant, wasp, or bee, or another gregarious and social animal. When a person dies, only the genuine philosopher enters paradise. The true devotees of philosophy refrain from sensual pleasures because they "are conscious that the soul was simply fastened or glued to the body—until philosophy received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself, and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity." The philosopher will be temperate because "each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be b In response, Socrates says that although a harmony is complicated, the soul is simple and hence not a harmony. In addition, he claims that the idea that the soul is a harmony is irreconcilable with the idea that it existed previously, as demonstrated by the notion of remembrance; this is because the harmony did not exist before to the lyre. After then, Socrates shares a fascinating tale of his own philosophical growth that is unrelated to the major point of contention. Finally, he outlines what happens to souls after death: the good go to paradise, the wicked go to hell, and the intermediate go to purgatory. He continues to explain the theology of ideas, coming to the conclusion "that ideas exist, and that other things participate in them and derive their names from them." It describes his demise and his farewells. "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?" are his final words.Socrates has recovered from life's fitful fever, just as men gave a cock to Asclepius when they recovered from a sickness. The Platonic Socrates was a model for later philosophers for millennia, and Phaedo adds, "Of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best." What are we to think of him ethically? (I am interested solely with the guy as Plato presents him.) His qualities are evident. He is indifferent to worldly achievement, so free of anxiety that he remains serene and urbane and humourous till the last moment, caring more for what he considers to be truth than for anything else whatever. He has, nevertheless, several pretty terrible flaws. He is dishonest and sophistical in argument, and in his private thought he utilizes intelligence to establish conclusions that are to him pleasant, rather than in a disinterested pursuit for knowledge. There is something pompous and unctuous about him, which reminds one of a horrible sort of priest. Had he not thought that he would experience endless happiness in the presence of the gods, his bravery in the face of death would have been much more astounding. As opposed to some of his forebears, he was driven to demonstrate that the cosmos complied with his moral principles rather than adopting a scientific perspective. This is the worst of all philosophical sins—betrayal of the truth. As a man, we may consider him to be accepted into the order of saints; nevertheless, as a philosopher, he must spend a considerable amount of time in a scientific purgatory.