Aim: to understand how to read more effectively.

Reading is essential for this course, but can be time consuming. Using these simple techniques, you can improve the amount of material that you can get through, and take more useful facts from it, using a technique known as ‘waypointing’.

Stage 1: See how far you can read in 60 seconds. Mark the page as to where you got to. What can you remember?

Stage 2: Find all of the names in a piece of reading, and highlight them in one colour. Find all of the key terms, and highlight them in another colour. Find all key phrases, and highlight them in a third colour.

Stage 3: Read through again, seeing how far you get. Mark the page as to where you got up to. What can you remember now?

Follow up: Do a full piece of reading, and try to complete it in 5 minutes.

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Plato’s Immortality of the Soul

Introduction

After putting forward his tripartite model of the soul, Plato turns his attention to the soul’s immortality. It is important to remember the following points which will be developed in this handout:

• Much of Plato’s views on the soul’s immortality can be found in his Republic.
• He starts with the concept of reward and punishment, developing it into his concept of specific evils.
• Plato was a thinker of his time and therefore understands immortality in terms of reincarnation (literally to be made flesh again).
• The ancient Greeks believed that the soul about to be reincarnated drank from the river Lethe (forgetfulness) which explained why people have no recollection of their previous life.
• Much of Plato’s teaching is put across through his account of his teacher Socrates. It is therefore difficult to say where Plato’s own teaching starts and Socrates ends.

Rewards Now and Hereafter

Towards the end of his Republic Plato turned his attention towards the immorality of the soul. For Plato goodness needs to be understood without considering its consequences. Goodness is its own reward – an end in itself and not a means to an end. Nevertheless, Plato argues that the just man is rewarded not only in his lifetime (i.e. by his society) but to an even greater extent after death. Plato believed that the soul was fundamentally pure but becomes deformed through association with the body. Despite this it retains something of its true nature – and shows this through longing for wisdom.

Specific Evils

Plato argues that each individual thing has its own particular evil which will cause it to deteriorate and eventually to be destroyed. Just as the body is prone to disease so to is the soul open to injustice and ignorance. Plato’s point is that if anything is destroyed it can be only through its own specific evil. We must conclude that it is only through its own inner weaknesses that the soul can be destroyed. We have no proof that the soul is made worse morally by death of the body. The soul’s specific affliction is immorality which can harm but not destroy it. Plato concludes that the soul must be indestructible and therefore immortal.

Reincarnation

Plato’s main argument for the immortality of the soul is found in his Phaedo. Following contemporary Greek religious belief and Socrates assumption that everything is involved in an eternal cyclical process, Plato naturally understands immortality (and pre-existence) of the soul in terms of reincarnation. Plato draws an analogy with sleep. Sleep comes after being awake and being awake comes after sleep. Likewise just as death comes from life so must death return to life again.

Knowledge of Comparisons

Elsewhere in his Meno, Plato through the mouth of Socrates argues that our knowledge of comparisions (e.g. equality) is innate and not learnt – evidence of a pre-existent soul. However, knowledge of particulars is forgotten at birth and has to be recollected with the help of a teacher.

Two Worlds

Socrates distinguishes between the world of change and the world of forms. He sees the soul as belonging to the world of forms arguing that it is invisible, reflective and naturally rules the body. Ideas are not physical things, so they must belong to a spiritual realm which is more real than the material realm. The soul is that which can grasp these ideas and so it too must belong to that realm. Since Forms are immutable; so too must the soul be.

Argument from incompatibility

Opposite Forms cannot exist in the same object (e.g. big and small). The soul derives its life through its association with the life Form. This association means it cannot admit death. The soul must therefore be immortal.

Plato’s justification for the existence of the Soul

Plato clearly believed that each person has a soul which lives on after the body dies; he also wanted to show that (in his view) this belief is reasonable and can be justified through logical argument. His dialogue Phaedo is mainly concerned with these arguments; Cebes, the person who is in dialogue with Socrates, suggests that perhaps the soul just disappears, like smoke, into nothingness when the body dies, and he asks for some kind of persuasive argument to justify Socrates’ belief in the immortality of the soul.

The Argument from the Cycle of Opposites

Plato’s first argument relies on the idea that every quality comes into being from its own opposite. It depends on the existence of its opposite, or it would not exist at all. He argues that big things would not be bigger or small things smaller without their opposites; they depend on their opposites for their existence. In the same way, people who are awake are just people who were asleep but then woke up, while people who are asleep are just people who were once awake. The idea very much influenced Augustine in his understanding of evil, as a quality that is the absence of goodness rather than a real power in its own right.

Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I mean such things as good and evil, just and unjust.

Plato argued that it followed that death must come from life, and life from death. That is, people who are dead are just people who were in the past alive but then experience the change we call dying, and people who are alive are just people who were among the dead but then experienced the change we call being born. Plato’s thought suggests an endless chain of birth, death and rebirth.

The Argument from knowledge

As we have already seen, Plato thought that the most important kinds of human knowledge are really remembering, ‘leading out’ things which we already knew. For example, according to Plato, we have our knowledge of equality even though we have never seen any two things that are perfectly equal, because there will always be some minute difference; and yet we know what true equality (or the Form of Equality) must be.

Plato thought that the same was true of many other abstract concepts: even though we only ever experience imperfect examples, we have genuine knowledge of truth, goodness, and beauty, just as we have true knowledge of equality and circularity. Plato distinguished this kind of knowledge from the sort of inferior, temporary, unreliable ‘knowledge’ that we might gain through the senses but which is merely opinion. Plato believed that this knowledge of the Forms must be innate, and must have been gained by our souls before we were born. When we come to understand something that is the object of true knowledge, such as the square root of 81, which is not available to the senses but is true for all time, we have a sense of recognition. For Plato, this was evidence that the soul pre-existed the body.

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