Plato's Phaedo - The Immortality of the Soul

in the middle portion of the fado plato gives three arguments in favor of the soul's immortality now along the way plato is going to address many important philosophical topics such as the nature of becoming or generation or coming to be and passing away as well as the nature of our knowledge of the world and the nature of the world itself and in particular how the world can be intelligible to us how we can use concepts and apply those to the shifting domain of reality the first argument for the immortality of the soul that plato gives is sometimes called the cyclical argument and the idea here is that there's a cycle of life and death and that some cycle somehow implies that the soul must outlive the life of the body so plato here is constructing a philosophical position by looking at some abstract principles and are asking about what those abstract principles entail so if we want to examine this argument we need to look at what these principles are and ask ourselves whether they're plausible and whether they are being correctly applied in plato's discussion the first principle we need to consider is this principle of becoming that socrates introduces on page 71 8 he says all things are generated from their opposite so cold is generated from heat pleasure is generated from pain and so on and so forth we need to ask ourselves what's the logic behind such a claim well the idea is look at what we're talking about we're talking about the notion of becoming a becoming b and becoming something turns into what it was not the child becomes an adult if you're just an adult the whole time there's no becoming so becoming involves chain now you might might say not all things come to be from their opposites for example a table comes to be from wood now wood and table are not opposites they're not the same thing but they're not opposites so maybe socrates has gone wrong here in thinking that all things become from their opposites but look at from another point of view socrates is on the right track in order to become a table you have to start off as not being a table and not table is the direct opposite of table so at some level of description we're going to find that everything is generated from its opposite now applying this very general principle to the present discussion we're wondering about life and death whether the soul goes on after life and socrates says if everything generates from its opposite then the natural result is that life and death being opposing things being opposites life must be generated from death and death generated from life now it can't be denied that death is generated from life that is to say that we go from living to becoming not living when we die the question right though is whether or not the lit life comes from death so does it work in the other direction now socrates thinks his principle of opposites arising from opposites applies universally so it would be very strange and ad hoc to suppose that in the case of life and death we had an exception here so there must be some perfect cycle between life to death death to life and on and on and on this is why it's called the cyclical argument the conclusion on 72a is that the souls that are in the living body must exist somewhere else so that they can be cycled back into life when the time comes the second argument that plato offers in favor of the immortality of the soul is called the argument from recollection but i think this argument will make much more sense if we go out of order and consider the third argument the third argument is called the affinity argument by many scholars this starts on page 78b this is where plato deploys a basic framework that he has about the nature of reality we just talked about generation and becoming opposites changing into their opposites things always moving around and changing now plato thought how could it be possible to know anything about a world that's always changing so when we start making claims or judgments how do we know that they're true if reality is always shifting underneath our feet always changing moreover in the best cases of knowledge those facts never change for example a triangle always has three sides and no matter how much things change in our visible reality that truth of geometry stays the same so in our best cases of knowledge we have this a temporal or eternal quality how do we resolve the observation that the world's always changing with the observation that our best claims to knowledge are unchanging how do those unchanging claims apply to the world of change at all the world is intelligible to us but if it didn't have some underlying form it wouldn't be intelligible to us because everything's changing in this very moment totally different than the previous moment and yet something is the same to address this plato has a famous theory of forms what we take in with our senses are the changing visible things but what we target with our minds when we make judgments and claims are the patterns not those specific things now the patterns are not themselves taken in through sense perception we don't see hear and smell them rather we think about them so the mind is somehow connected to the patterns that things take on and since the patterns don't exist in any sensible fashion they must exist in some non-physical non-sensible mental fashion when we make judgments about things we're accessing their forms or their perfect properties the forms never change our judgments about the world can be true because our judgments ultimately target forms not the things themselves that we see moving around but the eternal unchanging qualities that those things participate in when i have a red apple in my hand it participates in the form of redness more or less perfectly so redness applies to all of these objects to some degree of perfection the closer we can get to the form the more perfect the thing so for plato this is quite literally two different kinds of existence there's the visible world where things are changing composite unintelligible and there's the invisible world of the forms so two different ways of existing the world of the forms is what we access with our minds when we make judgments about things when we make true claims now plato now remember plato thinks of philosophizing as being a kind of separation from the body so our body is our being in this world of visible change and our mind is our participation in the world of the forms so the soul or the mind is much more like the world of the forms than it is like the world of the body since the mind or the soul has an affinity to the world of forms and the forms are unchanging there is no becoming there is no arising and passing away then the mind or the soul does not arise or pass away therefore the soul must be immortal that is not subject to generation and corruption it's only in its connection with the body that the soul has any kind of becoming but remember philosophy is the practice of aligning your mind with the actual ideas of things and coming to see their true properties that aren't represented by your senses so if we suppose that our minds are free of the bodily influence when we die the mind is going to populate the world of forms rather than the visible world that leads us straight to the second argument which was the argument from recollection according to this cyclical argument and plato's conception of the forms our soul inhabits the world of the forms before and after we die so we know the true nature of reality before we're born we're we are then generated into the world through a body and the bodily influence draws us away from the forms we forget them and when we learn new things we're slowly being reminded of what we already knew now that might seem quite odd why would plato think that all learning is recollection well first phenomenologically motivate for this for yourself think of an experience you've had maybe you've had it maybe you haven't but some people describe an experience as of when you learn something that's supposed to be new but you think this seems like something i already knew and i'm just remembering it now for the first time plato is also looking at the process of teaching someone and thinking you can guide someone into finding the right answers for themselves as long as you give them a little bit of a push in the right direction so people can come up with answers to the questions that they didn't seem to know the answers to as long as they think about it so he thinks the teacher doesn't need to put the answer into someone's head but to guide them into remembering how to find it out another reason plato thinks that all learning is recollection can be given like so all instances of concepts in the real world or the visible world are somehow imperfect even the most perfect looking circle is slightly imperfect even two pieces of wood cut to seemingly the exact same length may have slight um differences in length if you go down and look at them under a close enough microscope so when we say two pieces of wood are equal in length they're not truly equal the concept of equality has not been perfectly instantiated here so what is that concept of equality itself we never actually see equality in the world by contrast when we see imperfect examples of equality that leads us to be able to think of the exact perfect concept of equality that's a form it doesn't exist here in the visible world but our minds can access it when sufficiently motivated by the phenomena in the real world but because we can't access equality in this visible world in order to access it in our minds we must have already had some familiarity with it but where could our knowledge of the perfect concept of equality come from since it can't come from sense perception we must have acquired it before we acquired sense perception that is before we were born whatever you think of plato's arguments here the the important point is that he's moved us to think about some deep philosophical concepts how does the world come to be how do how do things come to be and pass away in time how is that coming to be in passing away in time intelligible to us and how do we come to know things about the world all of these philosophical concepts are tied up in plato's discussion of the nature of death from this discussion of the nature of death plato draws out many different conclusions and hypotheses about the nature of life ask yourself where are the virtues and drawbacks of plato's argumentation where can you find fault in his reasoning and where does his reasoning seem well motivated what sort of experience might have drawn plato to draw the distinctions that he does why is philosophy considered to be purely a mental activity and not a bodily one is that a sufficient kind of uh scheme of things or is it much is or are the body and mind more intertwined than that

Channel: Kyle Banick

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Id: gCO50syfuUc

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020