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from myth to science
[ 13 ]
Diotima’s view presented here—that the identity over time of every “mortal”
thing is to be understood in terms of a relationship among its ever changing
parts—is called a relational view of the identity of objects over time . It is the view to which
virtually all current personal-identity theorists subscribe. Before it could gain
ascendancy, the Platonic view had to be vanquished.
In the
Symposium, Plato contrasts identity through change with unchanging,
divine immortality. He goes on to suggest that to the extent that humans grasp the
eternal forms—in particular, beauty—they also, if only in the moment, participate
in immortality. But, as we shall see, in the
Phaedo , which may have been written at
about the same time as the Symposium , Plato focused not on our mortal nature but
on the immortality of the soul—the only part of our nature that he thought persists
after bodily death. Consistent with the
Symposium , he also pointed out that there is
a difference between the souls of ordinary people, which persist eternally but con-
stantly change their nature due to their attention to earthly things, and the souls of
philosophers, or lovers of wisdom (
philosophia
), like Socrates, who by seeking to
know the eternal become one with it. Only such souls—Plato’s heroes—achieve
“real,” that is, unchanging, immortality. Ordinary people, on the other hand, rein-
carnate, forgetting themselves in the process ( metempsychosis ).
Platonism
In the surviving literature in the West that predates the fifth century b.c.e., theo-
ries of the self were rarely articulated for their own sakes (Heraclitus’s views are
an exception) and even more rarely subjected to rational tests. Rather, they
tended to be implied by views that were expressed about other things, such as
social relationships or what happens to humans after bodily death. With the
arrival of Socrates (470?-399), this situation changed dramatically. Socrates is
depicted by Plato as someone who taught by deed as well as by word. In the mid-
twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have responded to a request for
the essence of his teaching by replying, “My life is my teaching.” Socrates, as
depicted by Plato, could have truthfully answered the same question with the
same reply. He claimed that life’s most important project is care of one’s own
soul. And he tried not only to discover the truth but to live it. However, he cared
for his soul largely by trying rationally to figure out the nature of things, includ-
ing moral and aesthetic things. In this rational quest, he was a philosopher in the
modern sense of the word, arguably the first of his kind in the West.
Socrates appeared on the scene in Greece just as the new scientific intellectu-
alism that had been ushered in by Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and others had begun
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