Socrates

Socrates, one of the most influential figures in Western philosophy, lived in Athens during the 5th century BCE. While Socrates himself did not write any philosophical texts, his ideas and methods were preserved by his students, primarily Plato, who immortalized him in his dialogues.

Source

Is the soul immortal?

Discussion between Socrates and Glaucon:

Haven’t you realized that our soul is immortal and never destroyed?

He looked at me with wonder and said: No, by god, I haven’t. Are you really in a position to assert that?

I’d be wrong not to, I said, and so would you , for it isn’t difficult.

It is for me, so I’d be glad to hear from you what’s not difficult about it.

Listen, then.

Just speak, and I will.

Do you talk about good and bad?

I do.

And do you think about them the same way I do?

What way is that?

The bad is entirely coterminous with what destroys and corrupts, and the good is what preserves and benefits.

I do.

And do you say that there is a good and a bad for everything? For example, ophthalmia for the eyes, sickness for the whole body, blight for grain, rot for wood, rust for iron or bronze. In other words, is there, as I say, a natural badness and sickness for pretty well everything?

There is.

And when one of these attaches itself to something, doesn’t it make the thing in question bad, and in the end, doesn’t it disintegrate it and destroy it wholly?

Of course.

Therefore, the evil that is natural to each thing and the bad that is peculiar to it destroy it. However, if they don’t destroy it, nothing else will, for the good would never destroy anything, nor would anything neither good nor bad.

How could they?

Then, if we discover something that has an evil that makes it bad but isn’t able to disintegrate and destroy it, can’t we infer that it is naturally incapable of being destroyed?

Probably so.

Well, what about the soul? Isn’t there something that makes it bad? Certainly, all the things we were mentioning: Injustice, licentiousness, cowardice, and lack of learning. Does any of these disintegrate and destroy the soul? Keep your wits about you, and let’s not be deceived into thinking that, when an unjust and foolish person is caught, he has been destroyed by injustice, which is evil in a soul. Let’s think about it this way instead: Just as the body is worn out, destroyed, and brought to the point where it is a body no longer by disease, which is evil in a body, so all the things we mentioned just now reach the point at which they cease to be what they are through their own peculiar evil, which attaches itself to them and is present in them. Isn’t that so?

Yes.

Then look at the soul in the same way. Do injustice and the other vices that exist in a soul—by their very presence in it and by attaching themselves to it—corrupt it and make it waste away until, having brought it to the point of death, they separate it from the body?

That’s not at all what they do.

But surely it’s unreasonable to suppose that a thing is destroyed by the badness proper to something else when it is not destroyed by its own?

That is unreasonable.

Keep in mind, Glaucon, that we don’t think that a body is destroyed by the badness of food, whether it is staleness, rottenness, or anything else. But if the badness of the food happens to implant in the body an evil proper to a body, we’ll say that the body was destroyed by its own evil, namely, disease. But, since the body is one thing and food another, we’ll never judge that the body is destroyed by the badness of food, unless it implants in it the body’s own natural and peculiar evil.

That’s absolutely right.

By the same argument, if the body’s evil doesn’t cause an evil in the soul that is proper to the soul, we’ll never judge that the soul, in the absence of its own peculiar evil, is destroyed by the evil of something else. We’d never accept that anything is destroyed by an evil proper to something else.

That’s also reasonable.

Then let’s either refute our argument and show that we were wrong, or, as long as it remains unrefuted, let’s never say that the soul is destroyed by a fever or any other disease or by killing either, for that matter, not even if the body is cut up into tiny pieces. We mustn’t say that the soul is even close to being destroyed by these things until someone shows us that these conditions of the body make the soul more unjust and more impious. When something has the evil proper to something else in it, but its own peculiar evil is absent, we won’t allow anyone to say that it is destroyed, no matter whether it is a soul or anything else whatever. And you may be sure that no one will ever prove that the souls of the dying are made more unjust by death. But if anyone dares to come to grips with our argument, in order to avoid having to agree that our souls are immortal, and says that a dying man does become more vicious and unjust, we’ll reply that, if what he says is true, then injustice must be as deadly to unjust people as a disease, and those who catch it must die of it because of its own deadly nature, with the worst cases dying quickly and the less serious dying more slowly. As things now stand, however, it isn’t like that at all. Unjust people do indeed die of injustice, but at the hands of others who inflict the death penalty on them. By god, if injustice were actually fatal to those who contracted it, it wouldn’t seem so terrible, for it would be an escape from their troubles. But I rather think that it’s clearly the opposite, something that kills other people if it can, while, on top of making the unjust themselves lively, it even brings them out at night. Hence it’s very far from being deadly to its possessors.

You’re right, for if the soul’s own evil and badness isn’t enough to kill and destroy it, an evil appointed for the destruction of something else will hardly kill it.

Indeed, it won’t kill anything at all except the very thing it is appointed to destroy. “Hardly” is right, or so it seems. Now, if the soul isn’t destroyed by a single evil, whether its own or something else’s, then clearly it must always be. And if it always is, it is immortal.

Necessarily so.

(…)

But if we are persuaded by me, we’ll believe that the soul is immortal and able to endure every evil and every good, and we’ll always hold to the upward path, practicing justice with reason in every way. That way we’ll be friends both to ourselves and to the gods while we remain here on earth and afterwards—like victors in the games who go around collecting their prizes—we’ll receive our rewards. Hence, both in this life and on the thousand-year journey we’ve described, we’ll do well and be happy.