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[ 14 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
seriously to challenge traditional mythology. It was a time in Greek culture that in
some
ways is analogous to two later times in Europe when science challenged
traditional Christian beliefs: in the thirteenth century, when translations of
Aristotle, together with advances in Islamic science, were introduced to European
thinkers; and in the seventeenth century, when mechanistic physical science
began to displace Aristotelianism.
In fifth-century Greece, Socrates helped to pave the way for the eventual tri-
umph of secular reason. If this were all that he did, it would have been enough to
earn him a place of renown in Western intellectual history. But he did one other
thing that was even more consequential. He inspired Plato (429?-348? b.c.e.).
And unlike Socrates, who wrote nothing, Plato wrote a great deal. Plato, of
course, wrote in the
form of dialogues—philosophical plays—in which a charac-
ter named Socrates was the spokesperson for Plato’s own views. For a long time,
people simply assumed that this character faithfully captured the historical
Socrates. As depicted by Plato, Socrates was a vehicle for reason’s triumph over
tradition. As a consequence, what people took to be the historical Socrates
became a cultural icon—the first secular saint. To most students of philosophy,
he still has that status.
In the Phaedo, Plato recounts the jail-cell conversation that took place on the
day that Socrates was put to death by the Athenian authorities. In this conversa-
tion, Socrates argued for the immortality of each person’s soul, which he took to
be “immaterial” and akin to the divine. His view was then subjected by Simmias
and Cebes, his students, to intense rational criticism, to which Socrates replied
with counterarguments. The view of Simmias and Cebes was that the soul’s
relation to the body is like that of harmony to a stringed instrument. Hence, they
claimed, when the body decomposes the soul ceases. To a modern secular audi-
ence, it may seem that Simmias and Cebes have the stronger case, but in the
dialogue they eventually succumb to Socrates’ arguments. Nevertheless, their
arguments are the first in the West that we know about to explicitly question the
immortality of the soul.
In most modern, and perhaps even in many ancient contexts, Simmias and
Cebes’ sort of “deathbed behavior” would be ungracious in the extreme: they
tried to convince Socrates, hours before he was to die, that bodily death is the
end! Plato had a different view of the propriety of their behavior. In the dia-
logue, as Plato portrays it, Simmias and Cebes’ display of independent thinking
showed Socrates, as he was about to die, that they had gotten one of the main
things that he had tried to teach them. That main thing was the importance of
not believing anything dogmatically or unreflectively but instead subjecting
every potential belief to intense rational criticism and being always prepared to
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