Harry Hurd

Plato’s Ideas on the soul are easy to criticise. Discuss.

On the one hand, Plato’s ideas about the soul were revolutionary and extremely advanced for his time, as with most of Plato’s philosophies, yet on the other hand they appear to be both self-conflicting and flawed.

Plato’s ideas of the soul appear to change depending on the time of his writing. One particular constant however is his dualist position, believing that body and soul are fundamentally distinct. His initial theory on the soul was produced in his book Phaedrus. In it Plato was most concerned with demonstrating the immortality of the soul and its ability to survive bodily death. He proposed the idea that, like Aristotle’s idea of motion, whatever is the source of its own motion or animation must be immortal. Plato was writing at a time in Greek philosophy where popular opinion believed that the soul did not survive death, and that it dispersed into nothing, like breath or smoke. Glaucon, in the last book of the Republic (608d), is taken aback by Socrates' question of whether the soul can survive the material world, thus demonstrating Plato’s originality of thought. Plato believed that the soul must be immortal by the very nature of being the source of its own animation, for it is only through a psyche that things can be living rather than dead. The soul is both animated and at the same time the source of its own animation. Plato also states that the soul is an intelligible and non-tangible article that cannot be destroyed or dispersed, much like his ideas about forms of non tangible realities; such as beauty or courage.

 The argument from affinity, as Plato posited in Phaedrus, states that because the soul is an invisible and intangible entity, as opposed to a complex and tangible body; the two must be distinct and separate. Plato believed that which is composite must be divisible, sensible and transient; and that which is simple must be invisible, indivisible and immutable. Forms bear a resemblance to the simple, immutable entities, such as beauty; however a beautiful painting is transient and palpable. The body shows an affinity to the composite by nature of its mortality and mutability; just as the soul shows a similar affinity to immortality and indivisibleness. To further emphasise the point, Plato writes "...when the soul investigates by itself it passes into the realm of what is pure, ever existing, immortal and unchanging". He argues that just as the body’s prime function is to understand the material and transient world, the functioning of the soul as an entity of rational and self reflective thought demonstrates its affiliation with a simple and immutable world; showing that the two are distinct.  However Plato does not explore the criticisms of this argument that just because an entity portrays an affiliation, does not necessarily require it to be as that which it affiliates.

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Plato believed that the soul, if it were to be the animator of all living things, must be responsible for a person's mental or psychological activities and responses. For the soul cannot be the reason for life, yet at the same time limited in its influence over the bodies in which it animates. However this provides one of the most serious and potentially defeating criticisms of Plato’s views on the soul. He fails to address the issue of the interrelationship between body and soul, if they are indeed distinct. Does the soul act as controller of a lifeless body, ...

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