I believe that at this point, I could portray fairly accurately the model of the soul for Socrates. Firstly, the soul is immortal, unable to be broken, and exists in an immaterial sense. It is the master of the body (not vice-versa), yet can still be influenced by bodily pleasures. It leaves the body upon death (in a sense, it causes the death of the body and causes the life of a new body) and goes into the realm of forms where it commutes with all forms and gains all possible knowledge. Aside from all of this, I am interested as to where the soul originated.
In the Timeaus, there are two accounts given of the creation of earth: the first account is that of the Intellectual and the second account being that of Necessity. I am particularly curious about the second account's claim that there are three things that existed even before the universe existed (out of necessity): being, becoming, and space. I am curious as to how the soul would exist in one of these three conditions if it were to exist before the universe came to be* (for lack of a better word). If the soul were to exist as being, then it would be unable to change; that is, it wouldn't change from one body to the next, or change from the material realm to the form realm. If the soul were to exist as becoming, it is necessary that it would always be changing and becoming. This condition would render the soul as being made and then destroyed constantly if this cycle were to come close to being in the infinite nature of the soul. But this wouldn't be the same soul in a sense, it would be a new soul created and destroyed each time. Yet, surely, the soul doesn't exist in space which is to be understand as simply the place for something to be or become.
If I am to salvage the image of the soul for me, I'm left to consider a few new possibilities: a) the soul might not be immortal, b) the soul has a part that is immortal and a part that isn't immortal (one part that is being and another part that is becomming), or c) the soul came after the universe was made. In the nature of Socrates, I wish to maintain that the soul is immortal; however, I wish to shine light on the fact that Socrates has proposed a model of the soul that contained different parts that were constituted an entire soul. Perhaps, in a sense, it is possible to present this model altered for our purposes. Perhaps the soul is that which is composed of both being and becoming at once; that is, perhaps it has a certain nature of actualization (to coin Aristotle) and a nature of potentiality. The soul would have two distinct parts that constitute a sense of worldly being that is constantly becoming something new so as to correspond to the world in flux and it would have a part that always is the same and doesn't change to the world. To think of this graphically, the part of being (not changing) would be like the center with the part of becoming (changing) on the outside.
Yet, even with this model, I'm afraid that more problems arise; is it possible to both be and to also become? If this is so, there would be no necessity for the soul to enter the body to be its master (if it has the power to actualize all at once with no body).
Final thought: the soul of the world must have come after the universe existed, or at the same time by both necessity and by wordily definition. If the soul of the world came after the universe existed, then it seems to follow by sub-alternation that the souls of people came afterward as well.
I read the text to claim that soul doesn't exist properly speaking until the universe is created. So while it still can be immortal, this does not entail it always existed. This is an important distinction - it's about the difference between something being everlasting and something being immortal. The text of Timaeus suggests that soul only comes into being when the blueprint or plan that God bases creation on is brought into existence. As a result, I would maintain that soul (which Timaeus identifies with the world-whole, permeating all of it) is basically the physical, temporal manifestation of the original plan God makes a copy of and brings into Being. There is a lot of talk in the early parts of the text claiming that the copy God fashions cannot in fact be eternal because then there would be two worlds. To me this suggests that soul therefore includes Becoming because it cannot be pure Being. It must be subject to Time ("the moving image of eternity") because it's in flux and not simply in Being.
ReplyDeleteStepping away from all of this for a moment, to my mind these distinctions are about the larger metaphysical account Plato appears motivated to give if he wants to explain the origin of the universe. The world clearly has some dimension of Being, by virtue of the eternality of truth and intellectual objects such as mathematics, but it also is subject to change (i.e. Becoming). So one might consider the Timaeus theory to be concerned with explaining how the world's unity-in-diversity comes to be. Surely it's not self-created, and surely it's governed by some kind of order. So the logical conclusion suggests the world we know is created from a reality that is pure Being. The human soul is said to be somewhat akin if not co-extensive with the stars of the heavens, such that it mixes with the physical elements of the world and takes a human existence periodically (we know how the story goes from here).