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from myth to science
[ 15 ]
follow an argument wherever it may lead. As if to reinforce this point, after
Socrates ostensibly won the argument by proving that the soul is immortal, he
immediately admonished Simmias and Cebes to go over his arguments after he was
dead to check for subtle flaws which the group may have missed.
So far as the nature of the soul is concerned, the Phaedo begins with Socrates
trying to figure out the sources of generation and corruption, that is, how things
come to be and pass away. In his view, the generation of a thing is caused by the
parts out of which it is initially composed coming together; its corruption is caused
by the parts out of which it is finally composed coming apart. Apparently the
bearing of this on the discussion of immortality in the dialogue is to suggest that
each person has (or is) a “simple” soul, that is, something that is not composed of
parts.
In Plato’s view, the soul is what a person essentially is. Its simplicity ensures both
personal survival of bodily death and each person’s “preexistence” prior to
incarnation into a body. In the Meno, Plato claimed that this preexistence explains one’s
ability to acquire knowledge, as in mathematics, that is not derived from sense
experience. One’s seemingly discovering such knowledge is actually a form of
remembering what one saw intellectually prior to birth. The soul’s simplicity and its
being what a person essentially is also ensure personal survival of changes undergone
while one is alive and embodied. Since cessation is due only to decomposition,
whatever is ultimately simple has to persist through changes—forever! Because the
soul is simple, it must be immortal.
In ancient times (and still today) almost everyone assumed that if people sur-
vive their bodily deaths, then there must be a vehicle (or medium) for their sur-
vivals. However, even before anyone had thought of the idea of an immaterial
soul, there was a ready vehicle available: fine matter. When Socrates was alive,
many Greeks thought that the soul leaves the body when the person who dies
expels his last breath. Probably they also thought that at that moment, the soul
simply is that last breath. As we have seen, Plato, at least in the Phaedo, claimed
implicitly, through Socrates, that the soul is immaterial and simple, that is, with-
out parts. That in itself is enough to distinguish the soul from breath, which
presumably has parts.
As Bishop Butler was to point out in the eighteenth century, Plato’s having
thought that the soul is without parts is compatible with his having thought that
the soul is material. In the physics of Butler’s time, an atom was regarded as a
simple, material object. There is nothing in Plato to suggest that he actually
thought that the soul is a simple material atom, but neither is there anything that
decisively rules out this possibility. So, the most one can say about Plato’s specula-
tive derring-do is that it was his genius (or perversity) to have suggested a radical
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