I am going to focus on the discussion in Phaedo that starts at 77b about how the soul can continue to exist after the body has died. By this point Socrates has already established a soul that exists before the body and is used to enable individuals to think they are learning new information, they actually are recalling information that their soul had access to before it was confined to a body.
Throughout 78 and 79 Socrates argues that there are two kinds of substances in the world, the visible and the invisible. He defines the invisible as being noncomposite and unchanging. While at first he just makes the case that forms are in the invisible category he quickly groups souls along with the invisible category. This categorization quickly becomes a problem because Socrates then tries to distinguish different kinds of souls from one another. In doing so he sets up a system of how the soul is supposed to interact with the body. For Socrates the greater the impact the body has on the soul the worse it is for the soul and the soul becomes weighted down and can therefore not reach the level of the forms after death and instead is reincarnated as either an animal or if the individual was good enough a human. In making it so that a soul can inhabit bodies of different species Socrates is making a statement about the nature of the soul. This means that the soul does not have anything to do with reason since that differs on a species basis. This also means that the soul does not contain the inner monologue that an individual has since not all species are capable of language (the inner monologue depends upon language).
As mentioned earlier Socrates thinks that the more of an impact the body has on a soul the more weighed down the soul becomes. This is a problem because of Socrates earlier categorization of souls with the invisible, unchanging, and noncomposite beings. Having the soul in this category was important for Socrates because many people in his time believed that when you died your soul dissipated like a breath and could fade away.
What you end up with is a soul that does not have memory of anything besides forms (because of how language is connected to memory and language is species based), that cannot reason, that does not maintain an inner dialogue, that is weakened by the attachment of a body, and that may or may not be in the same category as forms. Even if the soul is in the same category as forms and is thus unchanging, what you are left with is at most some basic features of the soul as a sort of guiding principle (as discussed in the Republic) that may contain key personality traits (since people become animals that they resemble in personality). I doubt this form of a soul, with so little left to its name, would be much comfort to anyone as a form of eternal life.
A very astute and thorough reading of S's doctrine of the soul in the Phaedo dialogue.
ReplyDeleteSome considerations that may supplement your entry: I don't think you want to say that the rational dimension of the soul can simply become an animal nature, and thus, that soul has no intrinsic reasoning capacity. Rather, the intellectual, incorporeal and immortal elements seem to be a somewhat separate thing from the nature of the creature a soul actually inhabits. I would suggest that S. thinks these incorporeal elements of soul are incorruptible and not subject to change. What can change, however (and this speaks to your main argument) is the manner in which the soul's rational element can be boosted or dragged down by the activity of body. While soul and the truth it accesses are immortal, this doesn't preclude, so it seems, the soul being weighed down by whatever experiences its host agent undergoes in mortal life.
What's at issue in all of this more deeply seems to me to concern *why* the soul's sojourn requires occurrence in a bodily existence, human or otherwise. Socrates' account in Phaedo argues that the soul does have a separate existence before and after death, but Socrates leaves open the question of why this process is necessary.