The second argument is the Theory of Recollection (‘anamnesis’) the idea that learning is just recollecting what we already know. Thus although none of us have ever experienced in this life things that are perfectly beautiful we know what beauty is. We do so because we experienced ‘true beauty’ before birth. On this basis it is argued that the soul will continue to exist after death as it existed before birth. However, most people reject the idea of a pre-birth soul and even if this was accepted the conclusion that life survives death does not necessarily follow.
The third argument, The Argument from Affinity, is in some ways an ontological argument for the soul. As mentioned earlier Plato (voiced here through Socrates) believed that the soul is not a composite thing but is like the Forms, thus he concluded that the soul, like the Forms, must be eternal. This can be criticised as although it would follow if the soul were a Form, but the soul is a particular, whilst the Forms are universals.
The final and most complicated argument for immortality of the soul is that absolute essences cannot admit their opposite. This argument proposes that as the soul is the source of life for the body and thus life is an essential aspect of the soul, Life and Death are opposites so the soul can not experience death in the same way that “Heat” can not become “Cold”. However whilst it is true that the concepts of Life and Death are opposites and an individuals soul is individual, when one dies there soul can go out of existence yet life in general continues. Even if someone and their soul dies that does not mean that life has experienced death.
Plato’s most famous, philosophical disciple, Aristotle, adopted much of the thinking of his mentor, however, in some areas such as the body soul distinction his views differed “Plato is dear to me but the truth is dearer still.” For Aristotle, a monist and materialist, any object is a unity characterized by; its form (its shape or arrangement) and the matter of which it was made. A person has a body (its matter) and a soul (its form). A person is not a composite of body and soul together (as Plato saw it) but the soul is an integral part of a living body. Form and matter are inseparable; this idea of unity between body and soul was later embraced by Aquinas and the Catholic Church.
Aristotle stated that if the soul (or one of its features) could function independently of the body before death, the same would be true after death, however Aristotle believed that the “at least certain parts” of the soul are “inseparable” from the body. Aristotle is not completely conclusive in his opinion over whether it is possible for any aspect of the soul to act independent of the body and also leaves the door slightly open, but only to the idea of ‘nous’ being able to exist separate from the body, an idea that modern science generally refutes. Perhaps the key idea of Aristotle’s view of the body/soul distinction is that of soul being an organising principal which animates the body (including animals). Aristotle concluded that to be alive the body needs the soul; and the soul needs the body. The two are inseparable.
The views of St Augustine see the fusion of Platonism and Christianity ‘If the Platonists could have had this life over with us…they would have become Christians, with the change of words and statements.” However, Augustine, predominantly a dualist, was sceptical about some aspects of Platonism, namely Plato’s belief in learning as a type of remembrance and thus he rejected any idea of the pre-existence of the soul.
Augustine, in his earlier writings, reiterated Plato’s general idea of the body, considering it to be a “cage” for the soul. Augustine’s embarrassment with the body could perhaps be due to his membership of a fringe Christian sect (The Manichees) who regarded the lower half of the body as the work of the devil as a young man, this aversion to the body is commonplace in some of the early Church despite it not following with its Jewish roots. Augustine was also influenced by the neo-Platonist Plotinus, who believed that the soul is superior to the body as it could exist independently to the body. In his later writings Augustine took a more unified view of soul and body and recognised that although the soul is superior, the body should not be despised that should not be enslaved but employed by the soul.
The philosopher Aquinas, whose views fall roughly halfway between dualism and monism, was heavily influenced by Aristotle. Aquinas saw the soul as the animator of the body and the defining element of the body, whilst also recognising that the soul needs the body. However, Aquinas, also believes that “The intellective soul must have a complete act of existing in itself, depending in no way on the body…The intellect has an operation of its own in which the body does not share” allowing for life after death, although he completely contradicts himself.
The philosopher Rene Descartes, a dualist and admirer of Plato, doubted everything in the pursuit of certainty and realised that the senses could be deceptive. Descartes reasoned that, as he had the ability to doubt, he must be something that thinks. Subsequently he drew a sharp distinction between minds and bodies. Descartes, in what became known as Cartesian Dualism, identified the ‘mind’ as being the seat of all feelings and sensations he experienced and could not locate physically. The mind is not the same as the brain. The mind is pure thought. Its essence is ‘to think’. Ideas are purely mental phenomena – they do not exist in the empirical world. Descartes addresses the problem faced by dualists over how souls and body interact if they are separate by reasoning that the point of interaction between mind and body is the brain (more specifically the pineal gland). Descartes is closely associated with this idea of Interactionism, that the body can affect the consciousness and emotions can have physical effects.
Ephenomenalism, a monist response to mind/body interaction associated with T.H Huxely, states that mental events cant cause physical events, the mind cant control the body. The electrical and chemical activity in the brain is experienced as mental activity, our consioussnous is simply the hum of our machines. This can be rejected simply as an act such as raising your arm is the product of thinking about it, as noted by John Searle.
Idealism, in this context the belief that only minds exist, provides a different viewpoint on the mind/body distinction. This way of thinking was subscribed to by Bishop Berkelely, who was also an ‘empiricist’ believing that knowledge is only obtainable through experience. If this is true then mind is all that exists, raising the question, if we are not there to perceive something does it really exist? Idealism, whilst it is difficult to disprove, is largely rejected as most believe there is a real material world out there that can be known.
The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, a materialist, takes a reductionist view of the mind body approach. Ryle, in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) described the dualist theory of the mind as a category mistake. This would be like visiting Old Trafford and asking where Manchester United Football Club is, the club is not simply the ground but the team, the staff etc. The ‘club’ is a sum total of all these things and does not exist as a separate entity. Ryle here uses the example of a university. In the same way there is no ‘mind’ that exists above and beyond the sum of total mental activities.
Like Ryle, John Hick is a materialist believing that person is a ‘psycho-somatic unity’ and rejects the view that the soul is separate from the body. However, Hick does not abandon belief in life after death, but believes in ‘replica theory’ that God is held to create in another space an exact copy of the person who died on earth (Hick illustrates this with the example of ‘John Smith’). The advantage of this is that it bypasses the complexities of asking how soul and body relates. The person who survived death would be recognised as the one who died and would have the same memories as the deceased. However Hick has been criticised for not taking into account the difference between being the same person and being an identical person. The former implies one to one copies, the latter the possibility of more than one copy.
Richard Dawkins might be described as a biological materialist, believing that any evidence of ‘divine activity’ is nothing more than an illusion. As a biological materialist, Dawkins holds the view that life amounts to bytes of digital information contained in DNA. He holds that the ‘soul’ is nothing more than a mythological conception, invented by primitive people for and believed in by the weak-minded, stifling creative endeavour. Rather than being enfleshed souls, Dawkins believes that there is simply no such thing as a soul ‘there is no spirit driven life force….life is just bytes and bytes of digital information’ Dawkins River out of Eden. Dawkins view, rather depressingly, is that living creatures are nothing more than ‘survival machines’ with a program to replicate. It could be argued here that this replaces the spiritual concept of the soul with a more modern myth as. It could be said that the evolutionary drive to ‘propagate the digital database that did the programming’ could be called the life force that drives the universe; Aquinas might simply add the phrase ‘this is what everyone understands to be God’.
The body-soul distinction was first “formulated as philosophical doctrine in ancient Greece” it was “baptised into Christianity, ran through the medieval period, and entered the modern world with the public status of a self-evident truth” when it was refined by Descartes in the 17th century. “Since World War 2, however the Cartesian mind-matter dualism, having been taken for granted for many centuries, has been strongly criticised” (John Hick). However whilst, the mind body distinction, first doctrined by Plato and revised by Descartes has been widely criticised in modern times, it can be claimed that it is no more a myth than the theories of the likes of Hick and Dawkins, that have attempted to displace it.
